


The Fire Breathes

by CheerUpLovely



Category: The Mentalist
Genre: Case Fic, F/M, Red John Murders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-01
Updated: 2012-05-01
Packaged: 2017-11-04 15:52:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/395548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CheerUpLovely/pseuds/CheerUpLovely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Red John's back, his victim a 17 year old girl, but when Lisbon begs Jane not to kill him she'll end up revealing a secret she never intended to share. Can Jane figure out his riddle, and does he have the heart to actually kill him?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

The house before them looked like a modern Roman villa, terracotta walls beautifully complimenting a stonewash patio leading towards the front door. Palm trees, too well placed to be anything other than imported through a professional gardener, stood proudly among the African daisies and the Cupid's darts – all well adapted to the harsher days of the Californian climate where drought was more common than waking up with a hangover on a Sunday morning. A red-tiled roof gleamed under the sun, impeccable and untouched considering the wilting oak tree from the garden next door looming over the far corner. It would have been expected for a tree in that condition to have many missing leaves dropping onto the roof below it, but the owners clearly had a handyman who cleaned it away regularly. If they were rich enough to afford a house of this magnificence, then they were easily in the price range of getting a decent handyman.

But the cleanliness of the home inside was just as deceptive. Both the outside and inside of the building were spotless, obviously the work of several staff rather than the residents, but the chaos that lay within the bedroom at the front of the house was extremely out of place. Lisbon took a deep breath, she knew that this was coming. She'd see enough messy crime scenes, distorted views that made her want to throw up no matter how much she choked it back and composed herself. It was all part of the job. She'd come a long way in her career, and she counted one of those feats as overcoming the weak stomach she'd had as a child. Perhaps it was the embarrassment her first set of colleagues had given her when she almost compromised the first crime scene she set foot on by vomiting in the corner because of the smell of a badly rotting corpse, or perhaps it was that the shock of things she had seen after that had never been as bad as it had been the first time around. Either way, she had it under control now.

"What have we got?" she asked Cho, the first responder to the scene. They stood outside the bedroom, she could hear the flash of cameras as the forensics unit did their work documenting the scene.

"Victim is Melissa Joliss," he told her, reading from his notes. "Seventeen years old, found dead in her bedroom at seven o'clock this morning by her mother when she went to wake her for school."

"Signs of forced entry?" Lisbon asked, choosing not to comment on how the victim was so young. Still in high school. Still with so much of her life ahead of her. These thoughts didn't help them stay objective to the case.

"None," Cho told her. "No signs of forced entry or an intruder, but someone definitely got in here."

"Evidence?" she asked.

"This," he said, stepping back and gesturing into the room.

Through the open door, Lisbon saw all that she needed to see. The blood in the room was sickening, turning her stomach for a reason other than the needless gore. It was more the placement of the blood that sent bile to her throat, and she swallowed it down with a grimace, not bothering to hide her wince. Blood covered the room, the girl's bed, the carpet, the girl herself...and the wall. But this was no mere blood splatter, no recoil of a weapon had scattered the girls life force on her bedroom wall. The mark was made with a hand, carefully crafted like an artist's greatest accomplishment.

The red face was a sign of all that that were in for.

"Oh, God," Lisbon whispered.

\--

Mark and Amanda Joliss were still in some form of denial that their daughter was gone. Jane understood that, they saw it often. Death is the one aspect of reality that nobody faces without somehow masking it out of fear, as Ernest Becker wrote. In this case, Melissa's parents were masking it with the idea that being found slaughtered in your bedroom with Red John's signature on the wall behind you was a natural cause of death. Yet, the disbelief and the despondency in their eyes told Jane that while they were so desperate to believe that their daughter wasn't the victim of a sadist, they knew the truth. That didn't mean they would be so fast to accept this truth though.

"Are you saying that somebody broke into our house to kill her?" Amanda, Melissa's mother, spoke in a shaking voice.

"Mrs Joliss, we are simply covering all the options here," Lisbon explained to her calmly.

"Plus, if somebody didn't break in and do it, it meant that somebody inside the house did this to her," Jane contributed.

"Jane-" Lisbon warned.

"Are you accusing us of killing our own child?" Mark spat at Jane.

"Of course not, sir," Lisbon stepped in.

"Is there anybody else living here?" Rigsby asked, trying to get them back on track before Lisbon took a swing at Jane. "No other children or relatives?"

"No," Amanda shook her head. "It's just the three of us here. Melissa is our only child."

"Who else has a key to the house?" he continued.

"Just the three of us," Mark said.

"Did Melissa have any guests over yesterday at all?" Lisbon asked.

"No," Amanda whispered. "What does that have to-"

"There were no signs of a break in anywhere in the house, so nothing that would indicate an intruder," Jane said. "Whoever did this knew the layout of the house, knew the weak spots for an entry. Either that, or somebody let them in."

"Nobody visited last night," Mark insisted. "Nobody even came to the door."

"Then it's simple," Jane decided. "Clearly Melissa knew her killer well and let them in of her own accord."

"But she was studying all night," Amanda excused.

"Where was she studying?" Lisbon asked.

"In her room, like always."

"When was the last time that you saw her?"

"After dinner. Maybe...six thirty?" Amanda recalled. "She said she had a paper due at the end of the week and she wanted to get it done early so that she could compare it with her friend's paper."

"What was her friend's name?" Lisbon asked.

"Sarah Walcott," Amanda said quickly. "The two of them have been friends since kindergarten. She lives just down the street."

"We'll need to speak to her; do you have any contact details for her?" Lisbon asked.

Amanda nodded. "Of course, I'll go get them." She got up and left the room, and when she was out of earshot, Mark cleared his throat.

"That face on the wall..." he started. "That's the serial killer, right? What's his name?"

"Red John," Jane nodded.

"It's a possibility," Lisbon said. "There are a lot of personal signatures that Red John uses, and we've found evidence of most of them in your daughter's bedroom, so this will be open to Red John's involvement."

"And he...he killed a lot of girls, right? A lot of people have lost their little girls to him."

"Too many," Jane said quietly. "It isn't fair."

Mark frowned, anger surging up clearly on his face. "You don't know-"

"Yes, I do," Jane told him calmly.

His frown turned from anger to confusion. "You lost one?"

"Two," Jane corrected. "My wife and my daughter. He took them both from me six years ago."

It was the casualness in his voice that made Lisbon uneasy. She was used to the regret, the pain, the unbearable suffering...she wasn't used to him being so cold about them. He never spoke of them so casually.

"So you're the best person to find him," Mark realised. "Because my little girl was taken from me last night and I already want to kill the bastard. Add six years onto that and you've got yourself a cold-hearted vengeance machine."

And that was exactly what Lisbon feared most.

"Mr Joliss-"

"You make him pay, you hear me?" Mark continued to Jane, completely ignoring Lisbon. "You make him pay for what he did to my little girl."

"He'll get what's coming to him, Mr Joliss," Jane promised.

\--

With tensions still running high between Jane and Lisbon when they left the house, Van Pelt and Rigsby chose to ride back to CBI in the car that Cho had arrived in, leaving their boss and the consultant to battle it out in the car. Jane instantly took the passenger seat as it was, so they knew that sitting in the back seat while the two of them argued was only going to make them feel like children when their parents were arguing. So they chose the sensible option, and let them go alone – hoping to God that there wasn't a body found dumped in the car park matching Jane's description.

"He'll get what's coming to him?" Lisbon quoted Jane angrily. "You can't say that to the victim's father!"

"It's what he needed to hear," Jane shrugged calmly.

"No, what he needed to hear was that his child's killer will suffer for the rest of his life in prison," Lisbon corrected him.

"And what does that get them?" Jane asked. "How is that supposed to make them sleep at night, knowing that their little girl was slaughtered in her own bedroom and that her killer sleeps in an allocated bed, gets three meals a day-"

"Jane, Red John will go to sentencing and he will die," she said bluntly. "He will get the death penalty. Capital punishment is legal in California in cases of first degree murder with enumerated special circumstances."

"Unless he's found insane," Jane pointed out.

"He won't be. These are carefully planned attacks-"

"The legal aspect of his trial will take forever," Jane complained. "He'll have time to escape. He'll kill again, and next time-"

"No, there will be no next time," Lisbon insisted. "We find him; he goes down for multiple charges."

"Well, perhaps gas or lethal injection is slightly too good for the man who massacred my wife and daughter," he shot back at her, his voice rising for the first time in this conversation.

"You do not get a say in this," she insisted, like she was talking to a child.

"I do if I'm the only one there," he told her.

They were silent for a moment, her choosing not to berate him about running off and getting himself killed by Red John. It wasn't until she parked the car outside the CBI that she turned in her seat to face him. "What do you get out of it?" she asked.

"Excuse me?"

"If you killed Red John, how would that make things better for you?" she asked.

"He needs to hurt as much as they did," he told her, and she could see the determination for this burning in his eyes.

"As much as they did or as much as you did?" she challenged him. At that, Jane was silent. "Jane, avenging their death is going to change nothing."

"You don't know that," he shook his head.

"Yes, I do," she insisted. "You think that it's going to help you, you think that it's going to take the pain away, you even think that it's going to help them, but it doesn't. It just replaces the guilt."

His forehead narrowed in curiosity. "Lisbon-"

"Whatever you're looking for, Jane, Red John's death isn't going to give it to you."

He stared deep into her eyes. "You seem to know an awful lot about vengeance," he noted.

But she offered him no more words. She just got out of the car and went into the building.

By the time he had waited for the elevator himself, Lisbon was making her way into her office with her coffee. Her words about vengeance, how informed she seemed on how little he would get out of the situation, had him curious. He often found there were things about her that left him asking questions without receiving answers, perhaps that was entranced him so much, what drew him in so much. She was a challenge to him, just as much as he was one to her. She wasn't aware that she could be just as trying on his patience and that he could on hers. Now, especially, she was almost infuriating by catering to his curiosity so much. She clearly had a message to get across to him, but wasn't pleased with how much she would have to reveal to get him to understand it, but they were just opening a Red John case, and she was distracting him.

So he made his decision and followed her to her office. He stopped her outside the door. "Lisbon."

"What, Jane?" she snapped.

"I need to talk to you."

She stopped at the door, turning to face him, which is when he noticed the file in her hands. The Red John file. "Have you done something wrong in the five minutes I've been in the kitchen?" she asked tiredly.

"No, but it's still important."

"Jane, I have a case to solve."

"We have a case to solve," he corrected. "But this isn't about the case."

"Then it's going to have to wait," she told him. "We have a dead teenager and it's leading us to another sociopath copycat or the real Red John. Either way, we have a long few days ahead of us. I have calls to make, visits to arrange, people to question-"

"Lisbon!" he interrupted her.

"Jane, I am busy," she snapped, yet again.

"Five minutes, that's all I ask," he reasoned.

She glanced through the doorway at her office, and surrendered. Halfway. "Two and a half minutes. Speak fast."

He accepted this as the best he was going to get from her. "You said that avenging their deaths would do nothing," he prompted.

"Are you going to waste your two and a half minutes repeating what I've already said?" she complained.

"How do you know that it'll do nothing?" he asked her straight out.

"Jane, I do not have time for this-"

"The phone calls can wait for a few minutes," he assured her.

"No, Jane, they can't!" she told him. "Not for this case. If this is genuinely Red John then we need to find him before he kills another innocent person. We can't afford to waste time on this. When did you stop caring about catching him?"

"I didn't, you know that," he told her. "I just want to have a conversation."

"Well, we don't have time for one now," she shot him down.

"I just wanted to know-"

"Jane, I said that earlier because I've been there, ok? I've been there. I've been where you were and I acted like an adult with it. Now, go away."

It happened so fast, that the door had long since slammed in his face when he realised her words. He frowned at the closed blinds, knowing that if they weren't there he'd no doubt see her making her phone calls, taking a deep breath before to calm herself down. She'd been where he was. But what did she mean by that? He'd been in many places, good places, bad places. Mostly bad. However, he'd never read any of that from her. He knew that she had lost her mother, suffered abuse from her father, raised her brothers, sacrificed her childhood...but he'd...he'd not been in any of those places. What place had she been in that related to his feud with Red John?

"What did you do this time?" Rigsby asked, as he walked back to his couch.

Jane was still stunned. "...I think it was something someone else did."


	2. Chapter Two

Lisbon's apartment was small and cosy. There was just enough room for one person to live comfortably, maybe two people who didn't have many belongings and who had a healthy respect for each other's personal space. There was one bedroom and one bathroom, all that was needed for the singular person who occupied the space. There was a rack in the shower that held her shampoo, her conditioner and her body wash – the same brands she no doubt bought every week, loving the familiarity, not quite daring enough to experiment with a new brand that might not be up to par. There was a shelf in the kitchen that held several jars of the coffee brand she favoured when she was at home, choosing to stock up in advance rather than be caught short in a morning of desperation. That was Lisbon, always prepared – except in the case of her laundry. The smart clothes that she wore to work would always be cleaned, ironed and hung in her closet, while her casual clothes were thrown in various places – dirty ones in the kitchen by the washer, vaguely clean ones over the back of the couch, and completely clean ones on top of her dresser. It was the one way in which she was messy, other than the occasional coffee mug on her kitchen worktop where she'd been called into work early before having time to wash up.

Jane knew all of this from having been inside her apartment once.

Now, he stood outside the door, and knocked before he had any idea of exactly what he was going to say. He knew the general idea of what he wanted to talk to her about, more specifically the ominous declaration she had thrown at him outside her office earlier, but he didn't know how he was going to word it. He had some ideas, but he needed to test them, he needed to see her reactions to his theories, to figure out if he was correct. She was the hardest person he'd ever attempted to read, not even in the same field of comparison as Van Pelt, who was incredibly easy to read.

When she opened the door, she was definitely pissed off – a combination of the exhaustion she had refused to feel for most of the day and the fact that Hightower had forced them home to get some sleep. As this was still only a 'suspected' Red John case in the meantime, then they were still libel to rest, and while they were to report to duty at 7am rather than the usual 8am, they still had to leave the office. "What are you doing?" she asked him, miserable from the moment she saw him on her doorstep.

"Hello to you, too," he said, slightly put out at the abrupt greeting.

"Jane, we were sent home to sleep," she reminded him. "I intend to do just that."

"I don't," he shrugged. "I'll stay at the office, wait for any calls."

"Then what are you doing here?" she asked with exasperation.

"You were trying to tell me something earlier," he reminded her.

"No, you were trying to distract me from the case earlier."

"Teresa, please."

The use of her first name surprised her, he could tell, and at that, she appeared even more tired than she had before. "What do you want me to say, Jane?" she asked him.

"Can I come in?" he asked. "For longer than two and a half minutes?"

She sighed, stepping back and allowing him to enter her apartment. When she closed the door behind him, he was pleased to note the familiar aspects that had remained from before – the photo frames on the mantelpiece that he hadn't invaded her privacy to notice before were still there, and he thought he might pay attention to them this time. The laundry was scattered all over the room, that days work clothes joining them on the kitchen floor; he could see them through the open kitchen doorway.

"Am I actually going to get any sleep tonight?" she asked him.

"You wouldn't have anyway, or you'd already be in bed," he told her, glancing towards the photographs.

"How do you know I wasn't?" she asked.

He looked at her, taking in the sleep clothes that she wore. They weren't suitable for the heat that night would bring – long trousers with a large sports jersey. She was always the first of them to shed their suit jacket when the Californian heat got to her, so he figured she'd be the sort of person that slowly undressed during the night, losing the trousers then the shirt in her attempt to be cooler, yet also keep the bedclothes. That, and her hair. If she moved around that much to keep shedding her clothing, she obviously moved around a lot, and at the moment her hair was still perfectly flat against her scalp, not tousled in the slightest. "I just know," he shrugged.

She sighed. "Just ask what you came here to ask so I can get to sleep," she told him.

"You've been where I am. Where I was," he prompted her.

"I have," she told him honestly.

"You lost someone," he guessed, watching her reactions. She responded by avoiding his eyes and taking a seat on the edge of the couch. He remained standing. "No, you had them taken," he corrected himself.

"Yes," she whispered.

"Who?"

"It doesn't matter who," she shrugged. "What matters is that I know that vengeance isn't the best option. It hurts to turn the power over to the law, but sometimes they can punish people better than your own hand could."

He was silent when he continued to read her, taking in not only the too-calm expression on her face but also the distance in her voice. "You don't want to tell me because you think I'll figure out too much about you."

"Is that so wrong?" she asked him.

"In this case, yes," he nodded. "See, you lost someone. There's a blue photograph frame on your mantelpiece with a young boy in it. So I would guess you lost a brother, seeing as I know you wouldn't have a child portrait of your father. Your brother was taken from you, and you knew who did it."

And then there were tears in her eyes, tears that made her duck her head and avoid his eyes so that they didn't spill out. "I don't want to talk about this," she whispered, suddenly like a child confronted with a frightening issue.

"We're going to," he decided. "You can't give me that much then expect me accept half a story. You know me better."

"Do I?" she challenged him.

He stood before her, looking down at her ducked her head. He was so close, than when he spoke he didn't need to raise his voice to get his point across. "I walked into my house, my own home, up to my daughter's bedroom and I saw my wife and my little girl mutilated on her bed. My wife. My daughter. You don't come back from that. Red John came into my home, he hurt them, he tortured them, he killed them, and then he painted his mark on my daughter's wall with their blood. The whole room stank of blood, of bodies that had been there for hours because I was too busy telling the world what kind of monster Red John was to be at home with my family. If I hadn't been doing that, I could have gone home, kissed my little girl goodnight, and told my wife that I loved her, but I can't do that anymore. I won't get that ever again. I'll never celebrate my wedding anniversary with my wife, I'll never decorate a Christmas tree with my little girl, I'll never get to see her grow into a beautiful woman just like her mother. I've lost all of that, because Red John took it from me. That's why I have to have vengeance. That's why when I find myself close enough to him, I will kill him, and yes, it will change everything for me."

Lisbon took a shaking breath. "Jane-"

But he cut her off, continuing his chilling, haunting speech. "My daughter was butchered in her own bed at five years old. Five. She was five years old. Her biggest concern was whether she wanted to a princess or a fairy when she grew up, and that sick bastard went into her bedroom and killed her just because she was mine. You don't come back from that, and you can't possibly understand that kind of pain."

"Jane," she whispered. He looked at her, finally seeing just how strong the tear flow from her eyes was. "Look at that photo again," she told him

"Lisbon?"

"Look again," she told him. "Look closer."

He went to retrieve the photo, taking the frame in his hands and going back over to where Lisbon sat. Looking closer, he could see that the baby was not much older than newborn, probably only recently taken home from the hospital. It was a boy, you could tell from looking at him. He had bright green eyes, large and staring at the camera. He was wrapped in a blue blanket, the first clue that he had been a boy. He had a no scowl, no newborn wrinkles. He was a perfect, pristine baby boy. He observed the ridges of his eyes and nose, the shape of his lips, the contours of his face. But the eyes, they were captivation. They were beautiful, and familiar, and they were Lisbon's.

"He wasn't your brother, was he?" he realised softly.

"He's my son," she nodded. "Was," she corrected herself. "He was my son."

"Oh, Teresa..." he whispered, not taking his eyes away from the photograph.

"Do you think it's worse to go into their bedroom and see what you saw, or to go into their bedroom and see nothing at all?" she asked him.

"When I said he was taken from you..."

"Yes, he was taken," she nodded. "Literally."

"And you know who did it," he understood.

"Yeah, Ben's father actually." She touched the photo frame softly. "Ben. That was his name."

"His father took him?" Jane asked, astounded.

She nodded, and sighed. "This stays between us?" she checked in a moment of panic.

He nodded in reply, looking up so that she could see the guarantee in his eyes. "Of course,"

"I was so tired," she started. "Ben'd had a cold for weeks, always coughing and crying...and then it just stopped, it cleared away and I realised how exhausted I was. I put him down for a nap in the middle of the day, a bit earlier than usual. I slept for an hour, went to check on Ben...and there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. He was just...gone. And your heart just stops."

"Yeah," he agreed in a strangled voice, remembering the feeling well. "Yeah, it does."

"Ben's father, Mark...he hadn't been around since Ben was born. We were both young. I was nineteen and he was twenty-one. It was a mistake, we never meant for me to get pregnant, but it happened and I like to think that I made a mature choice to keep him. I loved my son, and I supported him in every way I could. After Ben was born though, it turned out that Mark didn't want the hands-on-dad approach that he told me he did, so I did it all on my own and he turned to drink. When Ben started walking he kept bumping into things, as kids do, and he spilt one of Mark's beers when he bumped into the table and he really shouted at him, and I remembered what my father's drinking did to me and my brothers, and I swore I wouldn't have that life for Ben so I asked him to leave. He did, and we didn't hear from him again."

"So why did he take Ben?" Jane asked.

"A few days before Ben went missing, Mark turned up saying that he needed a place to stay. He was in trouble with the cops, so I told him no, but he stayed outside all night until they picked him up. Then Ben went missing and when I reported it, they told me that Mark had escaped custody that morning. I knew it was him. I just...I knew. He wanted to hurt me for choosing my baby over him, and Ben was the one way he could hurt me the most."

She ducked her head again as fresh tears threatened her, and Jane took one hand from the photograph and used it to hold hers. She didn't drop it. If anything, she held it tighter.

"It was three days before they heard anything. All my brothers spent the entire night looking for Mark, for any sign of Ben...I never slept in case someone called with information. The police told me to stay home, that it was the best thing I could do. Three days later they called me, asked me to go to the police station and suggested that I should bring somebody with me. I took Jack, my eldest brother. He was nineteen at the time, two years younger than me, but he was all I had. Jack and I went to the station and they told me that they had Mark in custody again. I asked them where Ben was and they didn't say anything for the longest time, and I kept asking them the same question but in the back of my head, I knew...and then they told me that they were sorry, and I fell apart. I knew that my little boy wasn't coming home."

Jane released a shaky breath, feeling sick. "He killed his own son?"

"Mark was messed up," she told him. "But my Ben was a beautiful, sweet little boy. He was two years and eight months old. Two. And Mark...what he did to my son was unbearable."

She started to get more upset, and he held her hand tighter. "Teresa, you don't have to-"

"They found things in his apartment," she choked out, her voice becoming higher and shakier. "Awful things. Pictures of him, doing awful things to children. He had photos of little boys being abused..." she started to sob at this point. "...and one of those boys was my Ben."

"Oh, Teresa..."

Without caring, he pulled her up from the couch and into his arms. The photo was caught between their chests as they embraced, Lisbon clinging to him as she cried for what must have been the first time in years for her little boy. He was overwhelmed with what she had shared with him. This was the last thing he'd have expected, even from her clues. It wasn't long before they were both crying for their lost children. For a little boy who had been abused and murdered by his own father before he was even old enough to understand that anything of what happened was wrong, and for a little girl who was killed because her father pissed off the wrong man. Both of them victims of disgusting murderers, neither of them deserving their fates.

"He cried for me," Lisbon wept. "He kept asking for me, and that's why Mark killed him."

"He's sick," Jane choked out.

She buried her head against his shoulder. "You know, I might have been young, and I might have been naive and stupid with the whole thing, but I was his mother. I was his mom and I couldn't protect his own father from hurting him. I was so tired that I slept deeply enough that I didn't realise my son was being taken from his bedroom. And it took me a long time to stop blaming myself and start blaming him."

"And you wanted vengeance," Jane realised quietly.

"He abused and killed my two-year-old son. He shook Ben so hard when he was crying for me that it left him brain dead, and then he abandoned his body in a ditch so that he died alone when his body forgot how to breathe. He was two. And Mark went to confess to what he'd done while my son was dying alone in a ditch. And I wanted to kill him and I got close enough that I could have strangled the life out of him...but I stopped."

"What made you stop?" Jane asked her.

Lisbon shook her head in his arms, pulling back to look at him. She'd realised that telling Jane about her son was the only way to stop him from killing Red John and jeopardising his own freedom. He had to understand why. "The person that was strangling Mark wasn't the same person that had been Ben's mother. I liked who I was when I had Ben with me. He made me happy, even if I was so tired from doing it all alone. He smiled, and he laughed, and he said 'love you mom' when he hugged me. He liked dinosaurs and he sang along with music, and he hated taking a bath even though he loved playing with bubbles. I thought it was the mother in me wanting to avenge my child's suffering, but it wasn't. I couldn't liken that hateful side of me to the person I'd been for Ben. And so I stopped, and I ran, and I let the state execute him three months later. I stood alongside the four other mothers whose boys had been in those photographs he had, boys who had survived, and I watched him receive the lethal injection."

"And that...that was enough?" he asked.

She nodded. "I always insisted that for Ben's sake, I'd always do what was right. Even though he couldn't understand, I would tell him that I made daddy leave because it was the right thing to do. And...and legal justice was the right thing to do. How could I possibly hurt him as much as he hurt my son? And the other mothers deserved justice for their sons too. If I took a life with my bare hands, I'd be as bad as Mark. I'd have deprived him of oxygen like he'd done to Ben, and then I'd be just as bad. How could I bear to think of my son, knowing I'd sunk to the level of the man who took him from me? So I thought...if Ben had come to me as an older child and told me that somebody had hurt him and that he wanted to hurt him in return, I would have urged him to go to the police, to let the law handle it...and so I had to be the same."

Jane sighed, shaking his head. "I never realised..."

"No one ever does," she said sadly.

"Teresa, who else knows about this?" he asked.

She shrugged. "My brothers, and then they told their wives over the years."

"You never told anyone," he stated in disbelief.

"No," she said simply.

"Not even Bosco?"

She shook her head. "He was a great mentor, but he'd have thought I was working for the wrong reasons, removed me from certain cases..."

"Like you do to me?" he pointed out.

She shrugged again. "It's all about protection, I couldn't protect Ben, so-"

"So you want to protect me, s o that I don't go as far as you almost did," he realised.

She nodded, wiping the remains of tears from beneath her eyes. "Yes."

Jane looked down at the photo again. "My Claire...she'd have loved Ben."

"Claire was your daughter?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yeah. She adored little ones, especially boys. There was a boy next door a year younger than her, and she tried to put glitter on his cheeks before so that he could become a butterfly. She...she had this mothering instinct, even at five years old. Probably would have ended up having ten kids of her own, always running up to friends with babies at parties, asking if she was allowed to play with them. She would have...she'd have been eleven last week."

"Ben would have been thirteen in June," she whispered.

"Who knows," he mused. "Maybe in another life, they would have been friends. They may have gotten married. We may have been in-laws together, had grandchildren together..."

Lisbon sucked in a deep breath. "Perhaps in their other life, they are friends," she suggested. "I believe there's a heaven, and I know my mother is there with him, but I'd like to think that Ben had somebody to run around with, somebody to play with, somebody to be his friend."

"I hope they are together," Jane agreed. "Taking care of each other. I'm sure...if my Violet saw him, wherever they are, she'd have taken care of him too."

They were quiet for a moment, and she surprised him by leaning back into his arms. It took him a moment, but he soon wrapped his arms around her once more. "Promise me you won't do it," she asked him.

"Teresa..."

"No, I need you to promise me," she told him firmly. "I didn't tell you this story for the fun of it."

"I need them to be avenged..." he told her.

"And I will make sure that he gets the death sentence, if you promise me that he won't die at your hand," she swore. When Jane was silent at this, she raised her head to look at him. "Jane, you have to promise." Still, he was silent. "Patrick, please."

At that, he snapped back into life, gazing down to meet her eyes as he muttered the two hardest words he'd ever said. "I promise."

"You promise."

"I promise," he repeated.

They remained there for several minutes, too afraid to move forwards and too close to move away. They were definitely standing too close to each other though. The miniscule distance between them was not a safe one, and could only end in a disaster. It was Lisbon that moved first, breaking this new connection they'd found as she returned her sons photograph to the mantelpiece.

"I should go," Jane fidgeted. "You should get some sleep."

She was quiet, but stopped him when he reached the door. "Wait," she called out, facing the photo still, taking in the still familiar sight of her son's cheek. "Do you...do you want to stay?" she asked him. "I'm close to the CBI than you are. It's easier if we get a call in."

"Teresa, I doubt I'll be sleeping," he whispered back to her.

She turned, meeting his eyes with a sight in hers that he'd never seen from her before. "Neither will I."


	3. Chapter Three

The next thing Lisbon was aware of was the fact that she was being shaken awake. Despite the urgency, sleep tugged back at her, fighting whoever was waking her for custody of her consciousness. The waker won, bringing her eyes open just a fraction so that she could recall where she was. The comfort around her reminded her that she was in her bed, and despite her efforts not to go to sleep, it looked like she may have had a few hours rest, at least. It was still dark, sunlight not yet pouring in around the curtains of her room, even though a quick glance her that they were, in fact, open. It was cool, which usually she would have welcomed in the usual Californian sun, but for some reason this morning it was rather irritating.

"Teresa."

The name snapped her eyes open all the way, realising that, not only had it been a long time since there had been a man in her bedroom, it was also a long time since they had been half dressed in her bedroom. But something that had never happened, was that the half-naked man in her bedroom, and calling her by her first name, no less, was Patrick Jane. When she focused on him, he was leaning over her from the other side of the bed, his hand on her bare shoulder as he tried to wake her.

Wait. Bare shoulder?

"Teresa, wake up."

No matter what the weather, Teresa Lisbon never slept in the nude. She felt exposed, even when she was alone in her locked apartment. Sure enough, when she moved her legs to turn and face Jane's direction, her own skin was unclothed as it brushed against her other limbs. Her heart started to pound, having never felt more awake in her life as she sat up quickly, somehow remembering to take the bed sheet along with her movement so that she could cover her bare chest. Jane snapped back a little as she almost knocked heads with him.

But that was a mistake. Being that close to him returned images to her mind. Seeing his eyes so close to hers bough back the memory of him leaning above her, staring down into her eyes with a darkness she'd not seen before. It wasn't there now, but she could remember it clearly and what it spoke of. Desperation. Need. Want. Possession. At the time, it had fuelled her, but now...oh god, what had she done.

"Take it easy," he whispered, steadying her arm as she whipped up quickly. But for him, that just recalled memories of grasping her upper arms, using the grip to pull her tightly against him, then running his fingertips down the soft skin as her sports jersey had been removed. As much as the memory made him want to repeat the action, he decided to recoil his hand.

"What time is it?" she asked him.

"Four-fifteen," he replied. "We got a call."

"Red John?" she whispered, her breath coming slower now she was beginning to calm, however the deep breaths she was now taking was just reminding her of just how much deeper they felt when Jane had collapsed on top of her.

He nodded. "The Joliss parents called Cho. He's been back to the house. Left a message in the daughter's bedroom."

"Oh, God," Lisbon murmured, as she crawled under Jane's arm to get out of the bed. The sheet dropped without regard for his presence, she just assumed that he would be more focused on finishing buttoning his shirt than watching her search for clean underwear and new clothes. She put her fresh undergarments on, her back to him the entire time, and went about finding a shirt. A quick glance over her shoulder when she didn't hear movement showed her that he was still in the room, but wasn't so fussed about moving. Instead, he was watching her change before him, and that darkness had returned. "Jane..."

"Two hours ago we were on first name terms," he interrupted her, his voice rough and half-filled with sleep.

"Yeah, we were," she remembered. "I...I guess we should talk about...this," she suggested, pulling a shirt off the hanger and putting her arms into the sleeves.

"About the fact that you're suddenly comfortable enough to face me wearing your underwear with your shirt wide open?" he questioned. Lisbon rolled her eyes and started to button up her shirt. "Or not so comfortable," he corrected himself.

"We slept together," she said bluntly.

"We did," he nodded.

She sighed. "What were we thinking?"

"Comfort," he answered her instantly. "We both wanted it, needed it, really."

Another sigh, this one more frustrated. "We weren't thinking clearly," she said, shaking her head as she selected her work pants.

"We weren't thinking at all," Jane corrected her.

She put her pants on, doing up the zipper before noticing that he hadn't moved to get dressed anymore than he had when he woke her. "Jane-"

"If we'd been thinking, we wouldn't have done this at all. Not in the middle of a Red John case."

And just like that, the normal Jane was back – the Jane that sought Red John with a determination she'd rarely seen in a man. The darkness in his eyes as he'd watched her dress had disappeared, replaced with the coldness and fierce loathing towards the serial killer who had taken his family away from him. This had been the Jane that she'd wanted to get rid of, the one that she hoped had been stilled when she (stupidly, in hindsight) told him about her own child that had been taken, and her own quest for revenge. Somehow, she'd thought that when he promised her that Red John wouldn't die at his hand, she would have a reason to believe him.

"Jane, I know you're passionate about catching him, but-"

But then that Jane was gone, replaced with a shy smile with a hint of 'I'm incredibly pleased with myself'. "Uh...don't say passionate," he told her. "It's...bringing back some intense graphic memories."

She rolled her eyes, hoping that he didn't notice she was now sharing his thought train, and pushed past him. "Hurry up, we need to get going."

\--

The drive to the Joliss house was silent to start with. Jane slid into the passenger seat beside her without so much as a casual conversation. Red John cases rarely bought an air of casual to any part of their day, even if they were just refilling coffee. He was a constant shadow over every second of the case. Still, though Jane was silent, Lisbon could feel his eyes on her. She didn't have to turn to see that he raking his eyes over her body, no doubt remembering last night in a way that she was trying to stop herself from. She needed to focus, and Jane was undressing her with his eyes.

"He's left a message," she remembered him saying, and she repeated it to try and stop him from staring at her so intently.

"Red John. Yes," he said simply, his eyes settling on her collarbone.

"What do you think it says?" she asked.

He shrugged. "The usual. A taunting remark about how he knows we're investigating and that he's superior to us in every way."

Lisbon shook her head. "He's not."

"Perhaps he is," Jane suggested.

She turned her head briefly. "Jane-"

"If he wasn't, we'd have caught him by now," Jane pointed out. In the silence that followed, he reached out his fingertips brushing her thigh. She wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he wasn't going to be finding it in the middle of a case in the front seat of her car. "Teresa..."

"Jane, we can't afford to think about what happened last night," she told him. "Not now. We need our work heads on. We can't afford any distractions."

"We slept together," he told her, just as she had done upstairs.

"Yes, we did," she repeated.

"We wanted comfort and we made-"

Oh, she knew how this one went. "A mistake, right?" she assumed.

His hand trailed her thigh once more, and she fought the shudder. She wouldn't let him have that affect on her if he was going to call that a mistake. She wasn't sure what she wanted to call it herself, though. "I do think it was a mistake, but for the reasons you're thinking."

She scoffed. "And what reasons am I thinking?"

"You're worrying that I was using you as a way to forget, that it only happened because we've been linked by a similar loss, and that it was bad or unsatisfying for me," his eyes travelled her body again. "I can assure you, it certainly wasn't."

"For Gods sake," she muttered, pushing his hand away from her leg.

"No," he protested. "We need to talk about this now or we never will."

"Perhaps it's better that way," she suggested. "If it was a mistake."

"Teresa, wait-"

"Wait for what?" she asked him sharply. "For you to tell me that it was a mistake, that it meant nothing and we should pretend that it never happened? Let me save you the trouble, Jane. It meant nothing and we should forget that it ever happened."

"It meant something to me," he whispered.

She frowned. "What?"

"I said, it meant something," he told her, slightly louder. "It meant...it meant a lot and I don't want to forget that it happened. I don't think I possibly could. But we have a connection, Teresa, and I'm not sure whether or not that's just a friendship or something more. You're closer to me than anyone else, and I can't go through with anything that might compromise might."

"Like what?" she asked.

"We're in the middle of a Red John case," he reminded her.

She shook her head, staring with a new determination at the road before her. "Nice to know he's more important than me," she muttered to herself.

"Teresa...he watches us during these cases," he pointed out. "You know that."

And that thought did chill her blood every time, though she'd never let any of the team know that, especially Jane. "If this is about me being in danger-"

"Yes, it is," he told her simply.

She shook her head, and they arrived at the Joliss house which gave her a perfect excuse not to reply to him. "Let's go, Cho's waiting. And don't call me Teresa on duty."

\--

Peek-a-boo.

The message on the wall stared down at them beside the Red John face. If anything, the message alongside it only made it seem creepier then it had before. Lisbon turned to Jane. "Any idea what this means?" she asked.

"Peek-a-boo," he read. "It's a child's game."

"I know that much," she told him.

"It means that he's watching," Jane revealed. "Peek-a-boo, I see you."

"He's never given us a message like this before," Cho pointed out.

"It makes sense," Jane shrugged. "Disappearing from sight then making himself known again. The game suits its behaviour. It fits his superiority, he sees him as the game leader, the adult, and us as the pawns, the children."

But the way he was staring at the word made Lisbon's skin crawl. "Does this mean something to you?" she asked him.

He nodded. "It means he's watching me. It means he's seen something that interests him."

And he the look in his eyes showed Lisbon that he was referring to their evening together. The idea of Red John watching them sleep together made her want to be sick. "He can't have," she told him, ignoring Cho's quietly curious gaze.

Jane just raised an eyebrow. "Would it surprise you that much?" he asked her.

She ignored the thought, wiped away the uncomfortable feeling and walked towards the wall where the message was, comparing it with the smiley face that was already there. "This isn't blood," she noticed.

"It's paint," Cho confirmed.

"That's good," Lisbon realised. "It means that he hasn't killed again."

"Yet," Jane jumped it quickly. "He's planning to. He's chosen his target."


	4. Chapter Four

Jane was different after they discovered the message. He was back to how he used to be with a Red John case, nothing like he had been at the start of this case – especially nothing like he had been only a few hours ago. His coldness and determination was back, though his motive was different, Lisbon knew. It was the message that did it, or rather, Jane's interpretation of it. Granted, Jane was rarely wrong when it came to Red John, the way that the two connected and knew each other was incredibly frightening sometimes, but she honestly hoped that their involvement simply coincided with the message. She hoped that Red John simply meant that he was watching the case, that he knew they were assigned to it as per usual, or that for some reason he was still watching the house (must get agents assigned to protect the house, she mentally noted). She really, really couldn't stress how uncomfortable it felt to know that Red John may have watched her and Jane together.

Mark and Amanda, Melissa's parents, were less than thrilled with the idea of Red John coming back into their home. At this point, it was no doubt a Red John case, and it was being treated as such. More agents were at the house, an additional forensics unit on the account of him maybe leaving a trace of himself, but none of the team were hopeful. Rigsby and Van Pelt were ready to meet them at the office, still trying to connect the paper trail of Red John's connection to the family, and Cho was upstairs overseeing the forensics team and instructing the agents assigned to protect the family, should Red John return. Jane had insisted that he wouldn't, but Lisbon had insisted on it anyway.

"When did you discover the message?" Lisbon asked, sat in the living room with the parents just as she had done yesterday. Jane was walking around the room, a cup of tea that Amanda Joliss had made for him.

It was Amanda that answered. "Four o'clock," she told them. "I couldn't sleep. I've been spending time in Melissa's room; it helps me feel closer to her."

Lisbon frowned. "Ma'am, that room is still a crime scene-"

"I need to feel close to her," Amanda insisted. "She's my little girl, can't you understand that?"

Lisbon didn't answer that. She understood. She had sat in Ben's room for three days before her brother had intervened and moved her into her own room. "Did you have any visitors in the evening?" she asked.

Amanda shook her head. "We had some family over, but I checked her room before I went to sleep and the message wasn't there then. I woke up an hour later and there it was."

Mark frowned, finally having some input of his own. "These questions seem a lot like the ones you asked yesterday morning."

"Because it's a similar discovery," Lisbon told them.

"How is a message on a wall similar to my dead daughter?" Mark asked.

"Both could easily have been done by you," Jane shrugged.

Mark shot his eyes towards Jane, getting to his feet. "Excuse me?"

Lisbon stood up as well. "Jane, what the hell are you doing?" she hissed at him.

"What the hell do you think you're playing at?" Mark yelled at him, now standing right in his face.

"Well, it's obviously not your wife. She's heartbroken," Jane pointed out, indicating to Amanda, sitting so devastated on the couch that she'd barely moved when Mark began to explode at Jane.

"We lost our daughter," Mark hissed at him.

Lisbon stepped up, attempting to put a barrier between the two men. "Mr Joliss, I apologize-"

"I should hope so!" he shouted at her before turning back to Jane. "I'd expect more understand from you."

Jane didn't look phased by the man's anger. "Mr Joliss, I might understand what you're going through, but I don't understand why you're hiding something from us."

He frowned. "Mr Jane, I'd like you to leave my home now."

"Perhaps you should have said that to your daughter's killer," Jane suggested to him. "It's someone you know and trust."

The words had hardly left his mouth before Mark's fist was flying into his face.

\--

Another broken nose to add to the list. Lisbon had lost count of the amount of times he'd broken his nose. Given the amount of bleeding this time, she'd taken him to the emergency room on their way back to the CBI. Counter in the waiting times and the very time-specific plans that Lisbon didn't intend on mission. They needed to talk to Melissa's friends, and all of them just happened to be having a gathering nearby in just under an hour. That was enough time to drop Jane off, resist the urge to tie him down to keep him out of trouble, and get there in time to question them all. There was just one problem at the hospital...

They'd given him painkillers.

"Come on, we're back," she told him.

"We're home?" he asked, pleasantly surprised with that.

"No, we're at the office," she corrected him, taking off her seatbelt and sliding out of the car. When he didn't join her, she went around to the passenger side and opened the door. "Come on," she prompted again, her voice stressed.

Jane looked around them slowly with a frown. "This isn't our home," he complained. "This is your car. Did I drive here?"

She rolled her eyes. "We do not have a home. I have a home, and you have a home, we definitely do not share one. And no, you definitely did not drive here, you're high on painkillers."

She pressed the button on the seatbelt and released him from the car. He seemed to be having trouble with that part. He stepped out of the car and looked up at the CBI building. He pouted. "This is the office."

"Good, you know where we are, your powers of observation are intact," she droned. "That means you're perfectly capable of walking on your own. Come on, I've got work to do."

Stepping out of the elevator, she directed him immediately to his couch. As usual, it was void of any objects other than the blonde man himself – who would be there as soon as Lisbon put him there. She'd already arranged a method of keeping him there. She just hoped that Hightower wasn't listening as they walked past her office. Jane at any point could blurt out or reference what happened the night before, especially when he'd admitted that it meant something to him, but Jane on painkillers? She dared not think about it.

"Now, Grace is going to stick around and keep an eye on you," she told him as the elevator doors closed behind them, grabbing his arm from stopping him from wandering directly into Hightower's office. "Once you're laying down, Cho, Rigsby and I are going to interview some of the kids at the party they're having."

Jane's face lit up like a child's. "A party! Can I come?"

"No," she told him. "I need you lying down-"

This time, his smile was different. "Really?" he asked, a seductive tone in his voice.

She rolled her eyes. "You are going to lay on your couch and sleep of the side effects of the painkillers, and by the time I get back you'll be...relatively normal."

He pouted. "How come you get to go to the party and I don't?" he asked.

"Because I'm working and you can't be trusted with adults, let alone teenagers," she deadpanned.

"You're not working, you're going to a party," he corrected her, trying to flick her fridge as they walked which left them both staggering around.

"I'm not going to be partying, Jane," she told him, pushing him towards the couch. When he didn't move she put her hands on his shoulders to almost forcibly sit him down. "I'm going to be talking to teenagers and hopefully I'll find out something that could help us do our jobs."

Jane sat down without further complaint, but he wasn't happy. "I wanna go to the party."

"The party is for teenagers. You are not a teenager," she told him.

"No, I'm an adult," he said, starting to smile again.

"Apparently so," she agreed tiredly, not wanting to go into his mental age when he was high on painkillers.

"I'm a grown man," he said, his smile spread.

"According to your personnel records," she humoured him.

He looked up at her, his grin covering his face. "I'm a gorgeous, sexy hunk of a man..."

"Jane," she snapped. "Time to lie down."

He gave her a hopeful look, patting the couch next to him. "Are you going to lay down with me?"

She scowled at him. "Jane, I am warning you-"

Somehow, he was still smiling. How he thought this was a humorous situation she'd never know. "Funny, you were warning me this morning as well," he mused. "But as I recall you were talked out of that. In fact, you were talked out of a lot of things..."

"Jane!" she snapped.

This time, a devilish glint joined the grin. "Remember that thing we did that you really liked?"

"Jane!" she snapped again, with more anger in her tone this time. She leaned down more to his level. "I know that you're stoned to high heaven right now, but please remember that Hightower may be listening to what you're saying."

He cocked an eyebrow at her, reaching for her hair again. "Does the danger turn you on?" he asked.

She stood up, flailing her arms somewhat as his reach felt short and he looked confused. "Why am I even having a serious conversation with you? It's clearly useless."

"I'm not useless," he defended. "I can be very, very useful..."

"Oh no," she said, swatting his hand away as he trailed it through the air, trying to touch her without concentrating on his own movements. "You are not talking me into this twice."

"I already did," he said, with a dopey smile. "This would be the third time..."

"Jane. Lie down. Now," she half barked.

He waggled his eyebrows at her. "I like your thinking."

"Jane!"

"Sure you don't want to join me?"

Her eyes flashed with anger. "If you do not lie on that couch right now, I will tie you to it."

"Promise?"

"Jane!" she snapped, fully shouting this time.

Before Jane could speak again, Van Pelt appeared at her side with a cup and saucer in her hands. "Everything ok, boss?" she asked hesistantly.

Lisbon groaned with frustration, turning her back and walking off, gesturing wildly behind her in Jane's direction. "Please, just...keep him here!" she snapped, leaving the room.

Jane kept his head on the ceiling. "Teresa? Teresa?" When he got no answer, his smile disappeared and he looked like a small lost child. "Lisbon?" He turned his head, seeing Van Pelt. "Is she gone?"

She nodded. "Yes, she's gone."

"Did I upset her?" he asked.

"More than likely," Van Pelt nodded.

Jane looked crestfallen. "Oh."

Seeing the 'kicked puppy' look settle in on his face, and half-wondering if the painkillers would actually make him cry to complete the expression, she held out the cup and saucer. "I bought you some tea," she said.

He sat up and took it from her, sipping it slowly. He instantly grimaced. "Not as good as Teresa's."

She frowned at him. "Lisbon never makes you tea."

"She did last night, after she asked me to stay and before...before we got a call." Thankfully for Jane's lower extremities, the threat that Lisbon had put on him to stay quiet obviously worked even with painkillers and a usual lack of restraint. "She did this afternoon, at the hospital. That's 2 cups. But that insinuates that something happened, so I'm not allowed to mention it."

Perhaps it hadn't completely worked.

\--

By the time that Lisbon and the others returned that afternoon, the painkillers had worn off. She'd been tempted to time it on her watch and only return when he wasn't going to be annoying, and on any other case she might have done, but it was a Red John case, so she wouldn't. Interviewing twenty teenagers had taken long enough, though, even with two of them returning with them for more questioning. No sooner had she stepped off the elevator, Van Pelt had rushed up to her, looking irritated and shaken.

"Tell me you have something else for me to do," she begged. Lisbon frowned at her, and the younger agent fidgeted on the spot. She'd never appeared this desperate before, even when begging for more time in the field. "Please, boss, he's driving me insane."

Lisbon frowned. "The painkillers should have worn off by now."

"They did, hours ago," she confirmed. "He's like a three-year-old."

Lisbon nodded sympathetically. "Don't worry, you're off Jane duty now. I have something else for you to work on."

"Who are the kids?" she asked, watching Cho and Rigsby escort the two teenagers down the hall in the direction of the interview rooms.

"Melissa's best friend, Sarah Walcott, and her boyfriend, Dean Matthews. I need you to interview Matthews with Cho. Apparently he likes the ladies, and he's not a fan of Cho. See what you can get out of him."

"Thank God," she sighed. Lisbon stared at her. "Sorry, I know it's inappropriate, but Jane's been so irritating since you left that it's convinced me never to have children."

Lisbon actually chuckled to herself as Van Pelt disappeared faster than usual, and she approached Jane's couch. He was still lying down, twiddling his thumbs and staring up at Elvis. "What did you do to Van Pelt?" she asked.

Jane shrugged. "Her tea is nowhere near as good as yours," he defended, as if that were reason enough.

"I am not making you tea," she told him. "I'm too busy."

"I wasn't asking, just commenting," he said.

"I want you in observation," she instructed. "Cho and Van Pelt are interviewing the boyfriend."

He shook his head. "It wasn't the boyfriend. It was Red John, and the boyfriend is too young to be Red John."

"He might know Red John," she pointed out.

He screwed his face up, then unclenched. "It's silly. He has nothing to do with this."

"Fine, don't go then," she sighed. "You can stay on your couch a while longer."

Jane finally turned his head towards her, rolling it around on the arm of the couch. "Are you still mad at me for what happened with Mark Joliss?" he asked her.

"Yes," she told him bluntly.

"Oh," he said with disappointment. "I thought you might have forgiven me by now."

She shook her head. "I'll consider forgiving you if he doesn't file a formal complaint against the unit. Until then, you're staying in the dog house."

"Woof," he mocked, as she turned away from him.

"Shut up."


	5. Chapter Five

Being in Lisbon's doghouse was boring, he'd discovered that before. In lieu of his refusal, Lisbon had gone to sit in observation while they interviewed Matthews. Jane, however, had gone for a walk. He'd considered joining her in observation, just to taunt her, rile her up, perhaps get her talking about the previous night, but then he'd been distracted. He found a better target, a better means of conversation (not that he considered Lisbon bad conversation, just that she wasn't always fun to talk to when she was mad). Outside of observation there were several chairs for those waiting for questioning, and sitting there was a girl of similar age to the victim, her head buried in pages of handwritten notes and an open book beside her.

"Hi there,"

The girl looked up at him with a gasp, visibly jumping. She was surprised to see him standing nearby, but it gave him a clear look at her face without the paper covering it. He recognised her instantly as being in several of the photographs that had been in Melissa Joliss' room. Her auburn hair made her look like a younger Grace, but her hair was shorter, framed around the face to accentuate her green eyes.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you," he said, holding up his hands.

"I didn't realise anyone was-"

"There isn't, they're interviewing your friend. It's just me. Sarah Walcott?" he checked.

She nodded. "Yeah."

"Hi, I'm Patrick Jane," he said, extending his hand for her to shake. "I'm a consultant on Agent Lisbon's team. I'm sorry for your loss. Losing a friend is very hard."

She gave him a sad smile. "Thanks."

"You're studying?" he guessed.

"Yeah, I have an English paper due tomorrow."

The same one as Melissa had been doing, he supposed. This was the friend she had supposed to be checking her essay against sometime before they were due to hand them in. "Crime scenes aren't an excuse for a late turn in, I assume."

Sarah snorted. "Not even when it's your best friend. The way my teacher is, she'd just assume that it was a 'highly imaginative concoction to avoid a pressured workload'."

He looked impressed. "That's quite the description."

"It's what she said about my last excuse," she revealed.

"High school, huh?" he mused, taking a seat beside her on the chairs.

"Yeah, you know what it's like."

"Actually, no," he corrected.

She looked at him curiously. "Home schooled?"

He searched for the answer, and then chose not to elaborate. Most people stopped taking him seriously the second he used the word 'carnival'. "Something like that," he settled on.

"Lucky," she complained. "I wish my parents would have home schooled me."

"No, you don't," he said, reading instantly into her words. "You might not like the work, but you enjoy the environment. Pep rallies, homecomings, proms..."

"I enjoy some of the work," she told him, unconsciously tapping her fingers against the paper in her hands.

He smiled at her movement. "You must enjoy the work you're doing right now."

"What makes you think that?" she asked.

He shrugged, indicating to her notes. "The fact that you have very recently lost a very close friend, and while you're waiting to be interviewed you're writing a paper on a William Blake poem."

She frowned. "How did you know it was-"

"Your textbook," he pointed out.

"Oh," she realised, looking down at the book beside her, Songs of Experience. "Yeah, I guess that makes it kinda obvious."

He nodded. "Which poem are you studying?"

"We had our choice of which one to analyse," she explained. "I chose The Tyger."

And then he was back on that chair, tied tightly to it with endless layers of what he had worked out to be ordinary kitchen cling wrap. It stuck to itself with such strength that it was impossible to move his shoulders, even when he heard the ominous footsteps behind him, so rhythmic in sound that it was frightening. He could remember the tremors starting as the chair was lifted from the ground, set back at the correct angle. He remembered the sight of that distorted Halloween mask hiding the identity of the man who had been causing him to take the deep, even breaths that were all that was keeping him vomiting from being touched by the same hands that had killed his wife and child. He could almost feel Red John's breath by his ear as he taunted him with those words.

Jane found himself muttering them along with the memory. "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?" Oh, how he remembered those words, how they had traumatised his insomnia, making it so much worse as he mulled the words over in his mind.

"You know it," Sarah observed.

Jane just nodded. "I've heard it before." Several times, usually on an endless loop in the dead of night.

"You must have a pretty good memory," she admired.

"It's necessary in my line of work," he told her. "It's a hard poem to understand, though."

"At first, yeah," she agreed somewhat, her face clearly contradicting her. "But once you go through it line by line, it's actually crystal clear."

He smiled. "Or perhaps you're just incredibly intelligent."

Sarah dipped her head, blushing. Obviously not many people commented on her intelligence, he realised. That was probably why her face had betrayed her a while before. She knew in herself that she understood the content, the structure...every part of this poem she studied, but she lacked the confidence to show it. She would no doubt do a wonderful essay, but were she asked to stand up and present this in front of her peers, she wouldn't do as well. "No, it's not that," she told him. "You should see the rest of my grades. I figure if this is the one thing I can analyse well, I'd like to milk it for all it's worth, you know? Rub that A grade in Ms Lucian's face."

Jane nodded, perhaps thinking that all this Ms Lucian needed to do was show some more encouragement. "I must say, I'm curious about your analysis. Agent Lisbon won't be ready to interview you for some time and-"

She frowned. "I thought Agent Cho was interviewing me?" she asked.

"Agent Cho's going to be busy," he explained, knowing that somehow it'd end up being Lisbon who questioned her. He had a feeling.

She kept her frown, though, not allowing it to drop as she tried to find something in his words. "Did you find the person who hurt Melissa?" she asked anxiously. Hurt, he noticed. She said hurt, instead of killed, or murdered. Hurt. She was still in disbelief that her friend was dead. She was failing to associate the act of violence with the friend she had known for so long. It was why she was so composed, why she was able to focus on schoolwork only two days after her friend was killed, and while she was waiting to be interviewed on the last time that she would have seen this friend.

"We'll find out soon," he assured her. "Agent Lisbon still needs to ask her questions, though, and since we have time, why don't you share your analysis with me."

She gave him a tiny smile. "You don't have to cover up babysitting me by pretending to be interested," she said.

"I'm not babysitting you," he told her, looking around them. "In fact, I'm pretty sure that Agent Lisbon has insisted on somebody babysitting me."

She smiled at that. "They're not doing a very good job," she noticed.

"No, but they may find me soon," he realised. "So, without further ado..."

"Right," Sarah nodded, passing him the book so that he could see the entirety of the poem. It was right before him, he realised. Red John had quoted this exact poem for a reason, and he was about to find out what it was. Months of struggling to understand the words was about to end with a seventeen-year-old with an English assignment. Someone objective, someone who wasn't looking at the words and trying to associate them with Red John, she was just trying to make an analysis for her school project. A fresh mind, exactly what he needed. On the other hand, he was attempting to use a schoolgirl under false pretences to figure out something that he admittedly failed at, but it's not like anyone knew about Red John's reference to the poem, he'd spectacularly lied about that, and it wasn't like this was the lowest that he'd sunk.

"So, this first verse," he prompted her. "What does it mean?"

"Well, the whole poem is Blake wondering, sharing his thoughts, basically," she started to explain, her voice taking on more of a formal tone. She'd have been good a presentation, had she the confidence. "Blake is comparing the fierce nature of the tiger to a burning presence in dark forests, and he wonders what immortal power could create such a fearful beast."

He completely agreed with that. Red John had been right in using the start of the poem as his quote of choice. It had been Jane's morbid fascination every time they had started each Red John case – what power could create a monster like Red John? He'd run through the possibilities in his mind, the classics; abused as a child, neglected, act of rebellion against a childhood he'd been forced to give up, witness to a brutal crime that had never been fully explained as wrong...but nothing that seemed to fit. Nothing that explained the sheer brutality of his nature. Red John was the tyger of Blake's words, but who had created him? Something powerful, something awful. He said nothing, not wanting to alert Sarah to his motive of hearing her words, and moved onto the next verse.

"In what distant deeps or skies, burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire?"

She consulted her notes for a moment and then returned her eyes to the open page of the book he held. "That's Blake saying that the eyes of the tiger are like a distant fire that only someone with wings could reach, and only with impermeable hands could hold," she said, indicating to the page as she spoke. "So, he's wondering where such a powerful fire could have come from. I think that the 'deeps and skies' could represent Hell and Heaven. That means Blake's insinuating that the creation of the tyger could only have been done by God or the Devil."

Once again, he nodded softly in agreement. Something stronger than the usual force had bought Red John down his path. Something that they wouldn't discover until they learned his true identity. "And what shoulder, and what art could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, what dread hand and what dread feet?" Jane read aloud.

"That's an allusion," Sarah jumped in immediately. "Showing how hard-hearted that the tyger must be towards the prey that it kills."

Oh, how hard-hearted Red John was. He must have been. How else would he have the heart that take life from so many young women, and a small child as well – his small child – unless he was really the heartless bastard that they all believed him to be. There was no likelihood that Red John went home after every murder and cried himself to sleep, or was kept awake all hours of the night through guilt. No, he wished those emotions and reactions upon everyone else. He wanted their families to cry themselves to sleep each night, and their loved ones to spend the small hours wandering around their homes, wracked with guilty every time they passed their wedding photograph, their daughter's handprint, their wife's laundry still folded, their daughter's tricycle.

"And this verse," Jane asked. "What the hammer? What the chain? In the furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp? Dare it's deadly terrors clasp?...that refers to the tyger's creator?" he guessed.

"Yeah, that's what I think," she agreed. "It's saying how the tyger could only be created in a place that confronts its nature. If the creator retrieved the tyger's brain from a furnace, like it says in this line," she pointed to it, "then it shows that the tyger would have had this behaviour and hostility from the very start, and that its mere creation started off the 'deadly terrors'."

"When the starts threw down their spears, and watered heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?...that's God who made the lamb," Jane realised.

"But if God was the creator of the lamb, could he also be the creator of the tyger?" Sarah debated. "It's a conflict of creation. The tyger is fierce and predatory and the docile lamb is its potential victim. This part at the start of the verse is the interesting part, though."

"How so?" he asked.

"It's about the creation process," she explained, "making the starlight symbolic towards the destructive process."

"So the birth of the tyger was the birth of the destruction," he understood.

"Exactly."

"Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye, dare frame thy fearful symmetry."

"It's the same as the first verse, but instead of asking who could make the tyger, it's asking who dares to," she indicated. "So after spending the entire poem working out who was capable of this, he comes to the conclusion that it must be an 'immortal' being so it can't be questioned. But is its strength and power a sign that it comes from Heaven, or does the ferocity and predatory approach to everything else say that it surely came from Hell?"

"Hell," Jane decided. No doubt about it, that monster came from Hell. No way did that sick monster come from the place he had sent Violet and Claire to.

"I thought that at first," Sarah nodded. "But then I realised that it's not about the answer."

"It's about the question."

"It depends on the readers' interpretation of the creation," she explained. "Some people will see the tyger as a beautiful creature worthy of admiration, but others will see it as a monster that slaughters the innocent lamb. Those who see the monster would assume that it's from Hell, because nothing from Heaven could be that evil to prey on the lambs of the world."

And then it made sense. Red John had told him the first verse as a message. He wanted Jane to figure out the cryptic clue he had whispered into his ear. He wanted Jane to work it out, to spend sleepless nights decoding it until he had figured out one more part of the essence that was Red John. He wanted to be figured out, he wanted to be understood, and when Jane hadn't been able to do that fast enough for his liking, he had dragged Melissa into the mix.

"Sarah, which poem was Melissa studying, do you know?" he asked.

"We picked the same one," she told him. "Hers must be way better though," she added, a hint of resentment in her voice.

"Why do you say that?"

"She was failing, big time," she revealed. "Worse than me. She wasn't going to graduate if she didn't ace this paper so her mom agreed to a private tutor when we got the assignment. We had a bit of a fight because he wanted her to do The Tyger and I'd already picked it."

"But she still did it?" Jane asked.

Sarah nodded. "She said that the tutor told her it was the poem with the most insight, and that the interpretations he could share with her would be much stronger than the ones I could show."

The interpretations being Melissa's dead body, he realised. She'd been pushed into doing the essay and then killed as a message. She was the message. Red John was using Melissa's death to hurry him up. It was a perfect taunt – why can't you figure it out, when school children can? Jane shook his head slowly, which Sarah took as an empathy for her situation, but he was scolding himself. Hindsight was 20/20, and he could understand what Red John wanted him to see, and why he had wanted him to see it. It was all about the thrill of a chase with him, and when Jane hadn't figured out the poem quick enough, it had called off the chase, forcing him to kill again to deliver his next message. It was the only way he knew how to communicate, to draw the exact attention that he needed.

"Melissa's parents never mentioned a tutor," he noted.

"Melissa didn't either, only ever to me," she told him. "None of them wanted anyone to know that she was failing. Her parents both went to Ivy League schools and got full honours...her moms a magazine editor and her dad's a published author – and their daughter's failing English?"

He frowned. "Why not tutor her themselves?"

She shrugged. "This guy just offered, apparently. He met her dad at a writer's workshop and they stated in touch."

"Did she ever tell you his name?" Jane asked.

"John something," she tried to remember, as Jane set down the book at her side quickly, it banging quite a bit faster. Sarah looked at him strangely as she realised how the tone of his questions was changing. "Mr Jane, what's going on?" she asked him as he got to his feet. "I thought Agent Lisbon was doing the interview."

"She is," he nodded. "And we need to see her now."

\--

Six words were all it took for Lisbon to abandon the interview with Melissa's boyfriend and allow him to swap the young man for Sarah Walcott. I know who Red John is. That was all it took. Those words, and the fact that he had come into the observation room to tell her instead of taking off on his own. The act of reliance, of attempting to keep that promise he made her in her living room the night before. It was enough to get her to listen, to get her to interview the right person. He'd insisted earlier that the boyfriend had no involvement, but she'd interviewed him anyway. Now, he was doing right, he was proving himself right, and from the fluttering in his stomach, he sensed they were closer than Red John than ever before.

"You're sure she never mentioned the tutor's surname?" Lisbon asked Sarah for the fourth time.

"I'm sure, she just called him John," Sarah said, confusion on her face. "What's going on?"

Lisbon withheld her sigh, looking over at Jane. "Call Cho," she instructed. "I want Melissa's parents here within the hour."

"Already done," Jane told her. "They're at her house now, should be here soon."

Lisbon nodded, turning back to the young woman before her. "Sarah, can you tell me when was the last time you heard from Melissa?"

"Two nights ago," she recited. "It was the text message I showed you earlier."

"Which said she was staying home to study," Lisbon consulted her notes.

"Yeah," Sarah nodded.

"And the following morning, Melissa's mother finds her dead in her room and Red John's signature on the wall," Lisbon muttered to herself, but Sarah caught part of it.

"Red John?" she repeated. "He's that guy off the news. The serial killer."

"And Melissa's tutor," Jane nodded.

Lisbon scowled at him. "Jane, a word," she ordered.

Moments later they were in Lisbon's office, her leaning against her desk and him stood in the doorway. "Jane, we can't jump to conclusions on this. This could still be a copycat-"

"No, it's him," Jane decided.

"On what grounds, and if you say anything to do with a 'feeling'-"

"It's not a feeling," he brushed aside. "William Blake."

She burrowed her eyebrows together. "What?"

"The girls English assignment was to pick a William Blake poem. They both picked The Tyger, only Sarah picked it out of choice and Melissa's tutor insisted that she picked it. Melissa's tutor, who would have been in the house, helping her study the night that she was killed."

But she continued to frown at him. "Jane, what does The Tyger have to do with Red John?" she asked tiredly.

"He knows the poem," he said simply.

She sighed. "A lot of people know that poem."

"Ah, but not a lot of people use it as a metaphor," he explained.

"A metaphor for what?" she asked.

"Themselves."

She racked her brain, but came up with no logic in what Jane was telling her. "There is no mention of any William Blake references in the Red John files."

"Because it isn't in the Red John files," he told her.

Her suspicions rose at his words. "And why wouldn't it be in there?"

"Several reasons," he shrugged.

"How about you tell me the one I want to hear?" she suggested.

"Ah, now that's a huge compromise, because you know that you don't actually want to hear it-"

"Jane!" she snapped.

"Ok," he surrendered. "I lied to you."

"When?" she asked.

"When you asked me if Red John said anything to me. I lied to you. I lied to you every time you asked me."

She resisted the urge to throttle him with her bare hands. She'd given him an opportunity to add some insight into the case, something that could have bought them to this point before Melissa had died, and he'd lied to her, completely rejecting her invitation for him to open up to her for once. "Why would you lie about that?" she asked him.

"Because I needed time to figure out what eh meant when he quoted the opening verse of The Tyger to me," he explained.

Her eyes could have cut diamonds. "That's the team's job, Jane. Not yours."

"Actually, Lisbon, the only person who's been able to figure out what he means is Sarah Walcott, and she doesn't even know it."

"Jane, it was a high school essay-"

"That for Red John, was a character study of himself," Jane explained. "He was getting Melissa to write his biography and when he read it back, he didn't like what she'd interpreted. Get Sarah to show you her assignment notes on the entire poem, it's actually rather insightful into how Red John sees himself. The poem itself shows that he wants to be seen as The Tyger, this unstoppable, powerful, predatory, and above all, untouchable, creature, but he identified with the words without realising that Blake always represented the Tyger as a creation from Hell. It's why I couldn't figure it out before now, I was suiting the words to him, just like he did. It took the objective approach to the words that exposed the monster that he really is. Read Sarah's essay, it makes perfect sense, and while you're doing that I'm assuming Cho's back now and I'm going to speak to Melissa's parents, because they obviously know who Red John is."

"You don't know that-"

"Yes, I do," he insisted. "They knew him, they let him into their home, and then they let him slaughter their child."

Lisbon was about to interrupt him when a hoard of shouting was heard from outside the office. "What's happening?" she asked, going to the doorway and standing right opposite Jane as they watched countless security guards and agents running in the direction that had just walked from minutes before. The interview rooms.

Both Jane and Lisbon followed them, and when they got the interview rooms they fought through the crowds. They registered the screams of Melissa's parents, but didn't approach them, instead heading over to Cho, who stood in the doorway of the interview room. "Cho!" Lisbon called, creating a path for them.

"He was here," Cho told them.

"What?" she asked in disbelief.

But then the agents before them parted, revealing a daunting smiley face on the far wall, and Sarah Walcott's dead body beneath it.


	6. Chapter Six

Darkness fell quickly after that. Jane wasn't sure how long it took for the agency to secure the building, start interviewing everyone inside. Hightower conducted some of them personally – Lisbon and Jane could hardly interview themselves. He answered the questions obediently, but inside he was seething. Red John had been here. So close. So close to them all, to where they had been several minutes before. Lisbon and himself had just left that interview room, Cho was about to escort the Joliss parents into it. Sarah had remained in there, only to be slaughtered. He was furious, not only at Red John and the situation, but also at himself. He'd been that close to him, a corridor away, and he'd had no feeling. No sense of danger. No inkling of the oncoming horror.

Lisbon approached the couch, watching as Jane sat there unmoving. One leg crossed over the other, forced up to one side as he made no move to spread across the couch. He propped his head up on one hand, the fist clenched against his temple. She crouched before him, putting her hand over the one that lay restless on his knee. "Jane, there was nothing you could have done," she whispered.

"I could have stopped him," he told her.

"Could you?" she challenged him.

"I should have," he insisted.

"Patrick," she sighed.

"When can we leave the building?" he asked coldly.

She was quiet for a moment, not commenting on the harshness of his voice or the way that he was avoiding her eyes. "Not for another hour at least," she told him. "Cho, Rigsby and Van Pelt are still questioning the maintenance staff."

"He was here, Teresa," he said helplessly.

"Patrick-"

"He was right here," he shook his head, unsure whether he was more angry or upset about that fact.

"Yes, he was," she confirmed.

"He knew where the cameras were. He knew where they were, he knew which direction they were facing. He knew how to get in and he knew how to get out again. He knew where we were and how long we'd be there for. Once again, he knows more than we give him credit for," he shook his head.

"We're going to catch him this time," she assured him.

"No, we're not!" he shook his head. "He's been here, we're not sure for how long. We can only assume that he was watching us, observing us. This wasn't like Rebecca and Bosco's team. He was here himself. He's seen us, seen the team with his own eyes. He knows where you sit, where you keep your coffee mug, where Rigsby hides his extra food, what book Cho's reading, how often Grace watches Rigsby...he's always watching me. He never stops."

He caught her eyes for a moment, and that was enough for her to understand. "You really think he saw us last night, don't you?" she realised, now fully convinced of the fact herself.

"Yes, I do," he confirmed. "I think what he did to Sarah was a warning."

"What he did was brutal," she murmured.

"If the warning was brutal, imagine what the punishment will be," he pointed out.

The tone of his voice was chilling. She hated hearing him talk like this, that's why she'd made him promise last night. She'd believed him at the time, she believed that he wouldn't lie directly to her face seconds after they'd shared their deepest secrets, how they spoke of their stolen children, but now? Now he looked like he might tear Red John to pieces with his hands. Perhaps that's why they were clenched so tightly, he was afraid of what they might do.

"Do you regret it?" she asked him hesitantly.

He shook his head, his voice becoming softer. "No," he told her. "No, I don't regret it."

"Really?" she checked. "It sounds like you do."

He sighed, leaning forwards so that they were eye to eye. "Do you understand what him seeing it means?" he asked her seriously. "He killed my wife and child because he knew that it would destroy every part of me that he could possibly get to," he explained. "He knew that taking my family would be worse than taking my life. They were my reason for living. They were every second of my day. And now he's seen you, he's seen us together, and with intelligence like his I'm sure he knows exactly what you mean to me."

Lisbon swallowed the words that she wanted to say. Now was not the time to ask exactly what she meant to him. They had more pressing matters to deal with. "You think he'll come after me," she realised.

He nodded. "Yes, I do."

"Because you care about me."

Jane was silent for a moment, and then nodded ever so gently. "There are three people whom I knew from the start it would hurt me to lose," he whispered. "My wife, my daughter, and you." Put that that context, Lisbon felt like a dirty mistress on the side of his marriage. "I never intended to have feelings for you, and I certainly never intended for Red John to find out about them."

"You never intended for him to come in here and kill Sarah Walcott either," she pointed out. "But it happened, and we have to deal with that now."

He put his hand over the one on her knee. "Teresa, if he gets the chance, he will kill you."

"I know," she nodded.

He frowned slightly, reading her face. "Why aren't you afraid of that?"

She shrugged a little. "What good would it do to be afraid?" she realised. She stood up and went to Van Pelt's desk for a moment, returning with a stack of papers in her hands. "Here's Sarah's assignment notes, and Melissa's parents gave us her notes too. We'll track her tutor down first thing in the morning. Until then, we aren't allowed to leave the building so we may as well do something worthwhile," she said, putting her game head back on.

Jane shook his head slowly. "I've been through this already," he told her.

"And we'll go through them again," she told him. "Red John put himself into Melissa's essay, it was a message to us and she was part of the delivery. The assignment was the information, Melissa was a warning, and Sarah was a threat that he would go through with it. These notes are all we have for now, but they're the most he's ever given us. If he made the mistake to let information slip, then we'll find it in here."

Jane sighed, nodding. "Ok."

Lisbon nodded along with him, surprised by his lack of protest. Submissiveness wasn't something that Jane was known for. "I'll get coffee," she said, heading towards the kitchen.

"Tea," he said softly. She nodded again, and continued walking, but before she could enter the hall he called her back. "Teresa?"

His words were quiet, but she still turned. "Yeah?"

He kept his hands on the papers, but his eyes were on her. "I won't let him kill you," he told her.

From the intensity in his eyes, she knew that he was sure of this. "I know," she gave him a small smile. "That's why I'm not afraid."

She left, going towards the kitchen, and when she was out of eyeshot, Jane finally unclenched the fist at his temple, the space revealing a scrap of paper. He unfurled it, staring at the red words on the white page that chilled his blood every time he looked at them.

She's next.

\--

He stayed there all night and into the morning, they all did. Though they had every right to go home and catch some sleep, every agent employee remained in the building. Intern agents and those newly employed were the ones who kept getting stuck with the task of replenishing the endlessly required stocks of coffee, sugar and milk, with not nearly enough to go around once people started needing it every ten minutes to stop themselves falling into a coma. Jane knew for a fact that Lisbon had four cups alone before nine o'clock came around, especially when it was becoming impossible to trace Melissa's tutor, even with the contact details supplied by Mark Joliss.

At ten past nine, Jane could no longer sit on his couch, read through the notes, and be a good boy. Every second that the clock ticked it was becoming harder and harder to breathe at a regular pace, to hold back on his blood boiling, and to stop himself locking Lisbon into a high security padded cell, convinced that this was the only place that Red John might not be able to get to her. He waited with bated breath every time that she left the room, whether she was gone for thirty seconds or, when he almost lost his mind early that morning, thirty minutes. It had taken less than five minutes of them leaving Sarah's presence for Red John to complete his massacre, surrounded by agents. With all the work going on, and all the confusion, he was half assured that the monster himself was still inside the building, taunting them with his background presence.

He stood from the couch, shoving the scrap of paper into his pocket. He could stand it no more, so he went into Lisbon's office, ignoring her confused glance when he shut the door, locking it behind him and then also shut the blinds. Her eyes followed him the entire time, her coffee mug half raised to her lips. The steam off it showed that she'd made it freshly, and she clearly needed it judging from the dark circles under her eyes – although an uninterrupted nights sleep would obviously be better for her than her caffeine addiction.

"What are you doing, Jane?" she asked him. He leaned against the door behind him, closing his eyes for a moment and letting out a deep breath. Now, she was really frowning. "Are you ok?"

"You were in that room five minutes before," he told her, his eyes still closed.

"Yes, I was," she frowned.

"That could have been you," he said quietly.

She nodded. "If you want to put it so bluntly, yes."

Jane opened his eyes. "He slaughtered her in the one place she should have been perfectly safe, the one place he shouldn't have been able to get to her, and it could have been you."

When she saw the look in his eyes, she turned the chair to face him, setting the coffee mug down. Standing, she walked over to him, standing immediately before him. With a strange twist in her stomach, she realised that the last time she had stood this close to him, there had been an embrace, a confession, an invitation to stay...and then a kiss that lead to so much more. She pushed the feeling aside. "Patrick, I'm fine," she assured him, her voice whispering his first name in an attempt to convince him further. It still felt alien to her. "I'm right here, and I'm fine."

"You could have been killed," he choked.

"But I wasn't," she assured. "I'm fine."

"This time," he pointed out. "What about next time?"

"Next time, we'll catch him," she insisted.

"You said that last time," he shook his head.

"Patrick-"

"If you'd-"

"Jane, no," she said sharply, perhaps more sharply than she should have done. "We're not going to stand here and you tell me what you would or wouldn't have done if it had been me in there. I'm here. Yes, it could have been me. Yes, he could have killed me. But he didn't. What is it going to take for you to realise that?"

No sooner had she spoken, she was almost lifted of her feet with the force of his arms pressing her body against his. His lips found hers expertly, as if they had been doing so for years, and there was an urgency to accompany his passion. It thrilled her, shocked her, but she felt like she wasn't allowed to enjoy it because of the circumstances. He was using this to comfort himself, to assure himself that she hadn't been killed, that she hadn't been hurt, but it still sent a fire surging through her, a familiar fire that she'd felt guilty about after the first time. Last time he'd kissed her like this, it had built slowly to this ferocity, but this had started off with that, and it was almost shameful how quickly she forgot about everything.

When he released her lips, his next words were whispered against them. "I'm so glad it wasn't you," he told her.

"So am I," she replied.

Jane pulled back a fraction, letting his arms release her. "He wants you next," he insisted.

She shook her head again. "Jane, we've been through this-"

"I took this off Sarah Walcott's body," he said, fishing out the scrap of paper and placing it in her hands.

She stared at it, holding it in her hands. She frowned, a small line appearing between her eyebrows. "You took evidence from a crime scene?"

"Teresa, he wants you."

"That could mean anybody," she excused.

"No, it means you," he said surely. "First the peekaboo message, and now this?" he shook his head. "He saw us together. He's been watching us. He knows that the best way to get me now is to have you."

Lisbon swallowed rather loudly. "Then he knows where I live," she realised.

"And here isn't any safer for you to stay," he pointed out.

She sighed. Apparently her first floor apartment wasn't safe from Red John, and Jane was right, here definitely wasn't any safer. But he wouldn't come back if it meant he would get caught. Red John never returned to the scene after he'd made his mark...except Melissa's bedroom. Nothing about this case was usual or normal, even for the madman's methods. "If he wants me, then he's going to get me. You do realise that?"

"Can you understand why I'm slightly upset about this?" he begged her, his eyes pleading.

"Well, yes, but this is our way to lure him out."

Jane took hold of her upper arms, shaking his head firmly and quickly. "I won't stand by and let him take you."

"He'd have killed us both in that room we'd been there," she pointed out. "And if he gets me, I know that the team will figure out a way to find me before he kills me."

"He could kill you straight away," Jane knew.

"No, he won't," she said, her voice now trembling with every word as she thought of the possibilities. "He'd be torturous, he'd make it slow, he'd make it painful, but he wouldn't make it immediate. He's not merciful. If he wants to use me to get to you, he's going to drag my death out as long as possible."

Jane's eyes flashed as the images passed before his eyes, an anger that this may happen again burning through his veins. "Before you start forming this plan you have to be prepared to die for me," he snapped. "Because that is what will happen if he gets close enough to you."

"Perhaps I am," she said quietly.

He stopped, whether it was just his movement or his heart he wasn't sure. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me," she said, no more loudly than she'd spoken before.

"You'd let him kill you," Jane tried to comprehend.

She nodded. "This would be the second time that he'd specifically targeted a CBI agent. That would look very bad on his long rap sheet when he finally takes the stand. I promised you he'd get the sentence," she reminded him.

"Not at the expense of your life," he breathed out.

"Does it mean that much to you?" she asked, almost a little confused at the matter.

"It should mean more to you," he urged.

"It clearly means something to you," she noticed, also noting that he ignored her original question.

He leaned in close to her, almost close enough for their lips to touch again. Their noses rushed against each other and he sighed, closing his eyes. "How could you even consider the idea that your life means so little to me?" he asked her in a whisper.

"Jane, what's really going on here?" she asked him.

"This shouldn't be happening," he whispered to himself.

"The Red John-"

"No," he cut her off, shaking his head even thought he movement almost pulled their lips together. "I shouldn't...I shouldn't be falling for you."

She inhaled sharply. "And are you?" she asked.

"I don't..." he sighed, putting his fingers through the ends of her hair. "I think..." he broke off again, moving his other hand to the small of her back. "I don't know what to do about it," he settled on.

She rose herself on her tiptoes, sealing their lips together in a kiss that caused his hands to move – one threading deeper into her hair, and the other skimming underneath the hem of her shirt, discovering the bare skin beneath it, she poured whatever emotion she could into the movement of her lips. It only took him a second to respond, and soon they were clutching each other closer than they had been in their last kiss. This was the sort of kiss that had lead to their more passionate clinch the other night. Lisbon was the first to pull away, placing another kiss on his cheek and then his jugular, causing a guttural groan in his throat. "That's what you do about it," she told him, and when she didn't get a response she assumed that he was pleased with this idea. "But in the meantime, I need you to help Cho figure out where Red John is," she told him.

\--

Hours later, Lisbon walked out of her office. She'd drunk so many coffees that she was sure her body was going to shut down in retaliation at some point. "Tell me we have something," she snapped as she walked out of her office. It had been hours, and no word on Melissa's tutor, which hadn't pleased her at all.

Van Pelt stood up, approaching her with a sheet of paper that was freshly coming out of her printer. "Melissa's tutor was going by the name of John Marlowe," she said, reading off the paper but then shaking her head. "I've checked everything I can but he's a dead end. Everything was fake."

Rigsby agreed with her, not standing but turning his chair to face Lisbon. "He got himself a fake degree and posed as an ex-English Literature professor from Harvard. I contacted the university personnel, but no John Marlowe has ever been employed. It's an alias."

Lisbon sighed, nodding. "Figured as much. What about the contact details he gave to Mark Joliss?"

"We're tracking the number now but the phone's not in use so it's taking a while," Cho told him, watching the trace on his computer.

"Keep tracking it," she ordered. "Let me know the second you get a fix."

"Yes, boss."

"Boss?" Rigsby called as she turned to go back into her office.

"Yeah?" she asked.

He cleared his throat. "Jane's...gone," he said slowly.

"Gone where?" she asked.

"We don't know."

That had her attention.

"What do you mean, you don't know?" Lisbon asked him, stepping up to his desk and seeing for herself that Jane's couch was, in fact, empty. There was barely even a dent where he'd been laying.

"He got stressed out an hour ago and said he was going downstairs for some air. He never came back."

\--

An hour. He'd been gone for an hour. During a Red John case. After all those things he'd said to her in his office. She tried not to appear as scared as she suddenly felt. The last thing the team needed was for her to start having a panic attack. She'd never thought she'd be as involved in a Red John case as she was in that moment. Had Red John still been in the building, as Jane had guessed, and had he taken him when he went for air? Or worse, had Jane received his usual brainwave and gone after the killer himself? She was actually hoping for the first option. If Red John had taken him, he'd have done so for a reason and there would soon be a message. But the latter option...it didn't bear thinking about. Jane's motives had changed in the past few days. He was more concerned two hours ago about her safety, not in his vengeance mission. At least Jane looking for vengeance was predictable. She had no idea what lengths he was capable of at the moment. The last time he'd made a random bid for her safety had resulted in him picking up a loaded shotgun (weapons, he hated weapons) and he had shot a man holding her at gunpoint – the man being the only one who could have led him to Red John.

What lengths was he going to in an attempt to protect her from Red John's message?

"Grace, call him," she instructed the younger agent.

She nodded, not pointing out that she had done several times in the past thirty minutes. "Voicemail," she confirmed, when there was no answer.

"That means the phone's still turned on. Track it."

"Boss-"

"I said, track it," she repeated.

The program didn't take long to pick his location up. "He's at his house," Van Pelt confirmed.

Lisbon turned to Cho immediately. "Cho, go get him," she ordered.

"Is Jane ok, boss?" Rigsby asked.

No, she wanted to answer. We're ridiculously close to talking about feelings that can never be taken back, we've just kissed several times in my office, we slept together the other night, and now Red John may be after me because of this. Oh, and Jane may have gone after Red John alone from stopping this happening.

"Yeah," she lied with a thick voice. "Hightower wants to see us in an hour for the press conference and I need him to be here for that."

Jane was right, she thought as she went back into her office, letting out a shaking breath only once she closed the door behind him. She couldn't even lie to herself.


	7. Chapter Seven

Silence.

He wasn't expecting silence.

He'd expected many things, keeping an open mind but not wanting to assume. The last time he assumed something Red John related it had ended in a massacre of everything he considered to be his life. It did no good to assume anything pertaining to Red John, but things needed to be sorted out. Things needed to end.

Tonight, they would end.

But for now, they would proceed in silence.

He'd entered his home, preparing himself for many inevitable outcomes. He prepared himself for Red John being there the second he opened the door. He prepared himself for seeing a smashed window, an open patio door, anywhere he could have entered. He prepared himself, chillingly, for the presence of another body, though he couldn't prepare himself for the possibility of that being a person that he knew and cared for.

Yet he opened the door, and Red John was nowhere in sight. In hindsight it all made sense – he would not be so obvious as to be waiting in full view. There were no smashed windows or opened doors, because if there was one thing that he had never understood it was how Red John gained access to so many places. More comfortingly, there was no sight or odour of another body. No, he was alone in this big empty house. He was all alone, nothing to accompany him besides the deafening silence stretching from the front hall to his bedroom, upstairs at the far side of the house.

Though he knew Red John wasn't there, he still systematically checked all the rooms. He saw the memories forming in front of his eyes, as if the belongings and the people in them were there as clear as day. In the living room, he saw his wife and daughter decorating a Christmas tree, he saw his daughter taking her first steps towards him, and he saw colouring pens and paper shapes littered across the floor, his glitter-covered daughter in the middle. He even saw when his little girl, at three years old, had taken those colouring pens to the wall, back when she thought she was writing her name by drawing squiggles along the whitewash walls – and he remembered getting scolded more than his daughter had because he was laughing at his daughter's act of graffiti instead of explaining to her that it was wrong.

The kitchen held some stronger memories of his wife. He could see her standing at the sink, washing dishes – she'd never use the dishwasher that he bought as part of a kitchen remodelling, because she found the soapy water and cleansing movements to be therapeutic. He could see her walking around in a huff one night, when he promised he'd be home on time and he was hours late without calling, shouting at him for being unreachable when something could have happened. He could see how it had escalated into an argument where she had accidentally dropped a glass on his foot, a broken shard piercing his left foot quite dramatically and landing the three of them in the emergency room for the remainder of the evening. He could see her singing along to the radio, dancing in a random manner as she put away plates with the dishcloth hanging over her shoulder.

It was when he was halfway up the stairs that he wondered whether this was him saying goodbye to his home. He'd never considered the option of not being in this place, of not coming home and walking the same rooms that his family had done, of not returning home to them and every time wondering if this time they would be there to greet him. But one of two things would ultimately happen tonight, and each involved another body falling to the ground of this house. Either his, or Red John's, preferably the latter – his own body meant that he had failed, and that Red John would go on to kill someone else...Lisbon. If he succeeded, and Red John died tonight (not by his hand, he'd promised Lisbon that) then he would have no reason to stay here. He wished that he could say that he was still in this house because he wanted to feel close to his family, but he knew he was really here out of guilt. Guilt for not being here when he should have been, for not being here when he should have protected him.

He needed to leave this place behind now.

So when he went into his bathroom, he stared at his own reflection in the mirror, seeing behind him the forgotten image of his wife brushing her teeth, complaining with sleep-filled eyes that the alarm went off way too early, that she had a mountain of things to do during her day, that the baby had kept her awake half the night. He remembered with a more passionate nostalgia the time when her morning mood had clashed with his wide-awake restlessness and he had interrupted her complaints by silently pulling her into the shower with him. There was the chipped tile on the bathroom counter that had occurred when he had dropped a hammer onto the surface after putting the mirror up, taunting him with the amount of times his wife had bugged him to replace it.

He left his bathroom behind, closing the door behind him. His own bedroom was directly opposite, holding so many memories that his hand hesitated on the doorknob. The furniture was exactly as they had left it, completely untouched from when he had gone to the television studio that day. There was the bed, pristinely made by himself and his wife together in the mornings, the sky blue and gold embroidered comforter still laid perfectly on top of the sheets – sheets they had laid together in, sharing whispered nothings and sweet caresses into the tiny hours of the morning many nights. There was the lamp on her bedside table, the book she'd been reading lying beside it, still dog-eared on the corner of the page she'd stopped reading at the evening before she'd been killed. He knew her clothes were folded in the drawers, just like her laundry was still in the basket in the bathroom. He knew that it was his inability to deal with his grief properly was because Red John still lived, their murderer still breathed, and that once he was gone, Jane would be able to lay their memories to rest along with their bodies. He'd grown somewhat used to the idea of his wife's spirit walking along the halls of their home, complaining to his still-there body that he wasn't doing her laundry, that he should sleep in their bed, that he should put his clothes in the closet beside hers again.

And there, at the end of the hall, was that fateful room. His daughter's bedroom. The pale pink walls were faded, the smiley face present and even more ominous above the plain mattress that laid there. This mattress was from the spare room. Claire's bed had to be destroyed, because of the evidence it held, her mattress alone had soaked up most of his wife and daughter's blood. He'd found it impossible, considering so much of it had been scattered across the room, but the human body did wonderful things, and one of those was how much blood it really held. The toys were gone, the clothes, the furniture...it was all gone. Red John had removed the little girl's spirit from the room, and without that, the room was as hollow as he had made it to be. The furniture and belongings were all crowded into the spare bedroom, the one he never went into. He couldn't keep it in this room. He couldn't allow her memory to stay in the room she'd been slaughtered in.

But though the worst memories took place in this room, so had the best. He could see them remember them clear as day even though all that was in the room was a bare mattress and a daunting red face on the wall. This was the room they had bought baby Claire home from the hospital. This was the room they had laid her in her crib for the first time, both of them watching over her for hours just to see this tiny creature sleep. This was where Claire had proved her leg strength was developing by holding onto the bars of the crib and holding herself in a standing position. This was where Claire had gone from a mumbling 'da' over and over to calling 'daddy, daddy, daddy' directly into the baby monitor to attract his attention one morning. This was where she would point out of her bedroom window and watch the sea birds that she loved so much. This was where she had first told him 'love you, daddy'. This was where he had fought back so many happy tears, because when Claire saw tears of any kind, she would put her tiny hand on his cheek and ask 'why sad, daddy?'. This is where his daughter had lived, had thrived, and had died.

He went back to the kitchen, passing by the guest room on the way and selecting a single item of his daughter's. If he was going to die tonight, he wanted a part of her with him, a part of her that reminded him so much of every day life that it could guarantee that he would end up near her. His wedding ring would take him to his wife, and his daughter's plush unicorn would take him to her. He tucked the furry pink unicorn under his arm as he made himself a cup of tea, and then he went to the kitchen table and sat down, toying with the strands of glitter that were laced into the braids of the mane.

And then he waited to die.

He waited for his life to be over.

He waited for his life to be taken like that of his wife and daughter's.

Right up until he felt the blade of a knife graze along his throat, when he decided that he wanted to live.

"Fool," came the spat insult.

"Not foolish," he insisted, pushing his cup away from him and setting the unicorn on the counter beside it. "Clever."

Red John gently traced his throat with the knife, his hard breath beating down on the back of his neck. "Your Agent Lisbon's plan was quite ingenious in comparison to this."

"I wouldn't have let her do it," he insisted.

"She's a very determined woman," he pointed out. "She'd have defied your wishes, as you have done with hers many a time."

At this, the anger and fear he'd been struggling to keep under wraps started to unravel. "You've been watching her," he realised.

"She's a fascinating woman," he confirmed. "I can see what draws you to her so much. Strong, resilient, and yet, so incredibly feminine. Captivating."

Jane took a shuddering breath. "How long?"

"An irrelevant question."

"Not to me."

Silence. And then...

"Mr Jane, this isn't about you."

"No, this is about you," he growled. "Everything you've done, everyone you've hurt, it's all part of a personal shrine you've built to yourself. The world is your alter, and everyone in it are your sacrifices."

There was laughter behind him, and the blade stilled its dance across his skin. "You do not know me," he insisted. "You try to, but you don't."

"But you want me to know you," he pointed out. "Red John, the Tyger himself. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?" he quoted.

There was an intended silence, but Jane heard the unmistakable sound of frustration behind him. "You've become brave since our last encounter."

He was disappointed, Jane noticed. He preyed on the weak, the powerless. "And that worries you, because I've figured you out."

He covered the fleeting reveal from moments before with a laugh. "It would take more than the likes of you to worry me. You are weak."

"In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes?" he continued to quote. "On what wings dare his aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire?"

"The girl was not planned," he revealed. "She was a complication. It should be a warning to you that complications result in punishment," he warned.

"She explained her view of a poem interpretation to me," Jane explained, as if that were no complication at all.

But the knife pressed tighter to his throat, and though it was not enough to break the skin it was more than enough to cause discomfort. "And in doing so, she signed her death warrant."

\--

Pacing her office, Lisbon attempted not to let her imagination get the better of her. It would do not good to entertain what ifs, so she should focus on the facts, she told herself. Facts were what she was good at, what would close cases...Jane, her mind came up with her. Jane closed cases. No, facts. Focus. Jane was missing – no, Jane was at his house. Jane was at his house. Red John was potentially watching him – and her – and could strike at any moment. Jane was essentially off the grid, and Red John was after him.

"Agent Lisbon."

Hightower's voice interrupted her internal monologue. Her stomach instantly dropped. "Agent Hightower, ma'am-"

"Did you forget about our meeting?" she asked abruptly.

"No ma'am."

"Is there a reason why Jane and yourself aren't in my office?" she asked.

She sighed. "Jane's AWOL."

"In the middle of a Red John case?"

"Yes, ma'am," she mumbled heavily. "We've tracked his cell phone to his home, Cho's gone to get him."

But Hightower's concern didn't falter. "Red John stages a murder inside our own facility and Jane goes AWOL the next day. This isn't suspicious to you?"

"It is, but Cho's perfectly capable of handling the situation," she insisted. "If any back up was needed he'd have called it in."

Her boss stared her down. "The second he's back, I want the two of you in my office."

Lisbon nodded. "Understood, ma'am."

Hightower disappeared, and Lisbon ended up frowning, looking again to her cell phone. No messages.

"Damnit, Patrick," she shook her head. "What are you playing at?"

\--

The taunting slice of the knife against his skin kept Jane motionless. Red John never moved from behind him, never giving him a chance to catch a glimpse of the serial killer. He put up no fight as his hands were bound behind him, even though it took away one of his few defences. Now, all he had to keep himself alive were his words – which usually got him into more trouble than they did help. He could hear the footsteps pacing behind him, but he kept his eyes trained on that pink unicorn his daughter used to trail around constantly. The footsteps were even, four steps then a one-eighty turn and the process was repeated.

"You're awfully confident that your Lisbon will put me away," he taunted.

"Death sentence, actually," Jane corrected him. He wanted to keep him talking for as long as possible. He'd promised Lisbon that he wouldn't kill him, which meant that he had to keep Red John here, and himself alive, long enough for Lisbon to become suspicious about his absence, track his phone, and send someone over – he just hoped it wasn't herself. If she were to come herself, alone, then it was only going to lead to her death, and he would have to sit there bound to the chair and forced to watch. "People like you are the reason we still have that in the state of California."

"So simple," Red John dismissed. "It would be the perfect end to the story, were this a fairytale. Unfortunately for you, this isn't as simple as your Lisbon would like it to be. If it were, I'd have been caught before now but, alas, it seems I'm not behind bars, nor am I dead."

"You will be," Jane insisted. "Soon."

"Not before your Lisbon," he countered.

So possessive, he noticed. But possessive on his behalf. He was constantly referring to her as 'your Lisbon', branding her as one of his ameneties. It was obvious now that Lisbon was his next target – Jane's weakness, so the ultimate way to hurt him. "She isn't my Lisbon," he growled.

"So naive," he noted. "You know better. I know what she means to you even more than you do," he insisted, returning the knife to his throat again. "I thought you would have learned the first time. Someone who so publicly slanders people he doesn't know doesn't deserve such pretty things."

He was riling him, and while Jane fought to keep in control of the situation, he was failing miserably. "They didn't deserve what you did to them," he shook his head, making sure to keep it away from the knife's blade.

"But you did."

"They were innocent," he argued.

"But you needed punishing," he told him. "You made a grave error of judgement that day, Mr Jane."

"I told the truth," he defended.

"Truth hurts," Red John reminded him. "Although, it's never specific as to whom it hurts. In this case, your perception of the truth was incorrect and people are much more willing to accept bad traits to be true than good traits, so you had to experience that first hand so you could understand."

"You took my daughter from me," he spat, his eyes fixated on the unicorn.

"They were all somebody's daughters," he excused. "Though yours...she was very young. Not my usual, I admit."

"She was innocent," Jane said, his voice sounding like pleading.

"Yes, she was," he acknowledged. "She was perfectly innocent, perfectly oblivious to the way that her father provided false hope for hundreds of other innocent people. Tell me, Mr Jane, how would you have felt if a con artist had scammed your daughter the way you had scammed so many others?" he proposed.

Jane didn't even entertain the thought. "My wife..."

"That was a miscommunication error, sadly," he admitted. "She would never have had to die, had she not walked in at the wrong moment." So his wife had walked in to see what was happening. She had walked into their little girl's room and seen her being slaughtered. Anger burned so high in his veins that he could feel his eyes burning. "Still, she was beautiful, wasn't she?"

"You took my family from me."

"And you took my humanity from me."

"I exposed you for what you really are," Jane defended himself.

This time, it was Red John who quoted William Blake. "When the stars threw down their spears, and watered heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?" he taunted, leaning in close to Jane's ear from behind him. "Do you really want to know what made the monster, Mr Jane?" he asked. "You did."

"The monster was already there," he claimed.

"But you bought him out," he continued. "You bought the monster to your doorstep, to your daughter's bedside. You may as well have bought that knife down on their throats with your own hands. And now you'll do the same with your Lisbon's. Because of you, she's been bought into this...feud, shall we call it? Yes, that seems apt. It seems unfair, to me, to call it a chase, considering I have to bait you every step of the way," he stopped his insult of their intelligence and continued his chilling speech. "Because of you, your Lisbon will have her throat sliced open, her toenails painted in her own blood. Her hair colour is perfect, really, for the scheme. She does look beautiful in red, especially blood red-"

"You won't get close to her," Jane cut in, his resolve finally crumbling as he rose to the comments.

"Ah, but I already have," he pointed out, his pleasure in Jane's responding to his taunts obvious in his tone. "I got oh-so-close to her. Close enough to smell her perfume when she walked through the hall, right before I killed the girl. An alluring scent she has. Cinnamon, yes?" Jane was silent, struggling to take even breaths. "But you already know that. You've been close to her yourself."

And he snapped.

"Don't hurt her," he pleaded.

"Is that begging?" he noted. "My, we are desperate this evening."

"Just do what you came here to do," Jane told him, tearing his eyes away from the unicorn to try and see over his shoulder. "You want me to suffer."

"Taking your life isn't going to make you suffer. It's going to take you out of the game," he pointed out. "And I'm enjoying our game slightly too much to end it now."

He stepped in front of Jane, finally revealing himself to him. No mask. No cover. Just the man himself. Jane observed the bushy eyebrows, the menacing glint in his eye, the protruding cheek bones. Just as he had expected, a man slightly older than himself, perhaps early-mid forties, with dark hair and matching brown eyes. Dark in every way imaginable. This was the man who had killed his wife and daughter. This was the man who had taunted him, tortured him mentally.

This was Red John standing before him, knife in hand.

This was the moment, he supposed, that Patrick Jane died.

"I hope you rot in Hell," Jane growled at him.

The man before him twisted his thin lips in a sickening smile. He could imagine his daughter being so terrified if she had woken to see this man at her bedside. "Alongside your family, I assure you."

Red John lifted the blade, dragging it back with such force that it would undoubtedly pierce him with a staggering strength. Jane didn't close his eyes, but he did move his gaze slightly to the left so that he could see the pink unicorn on the kitchen table again. He did, however, wince, as he saw the movement of Red John's arm begin to descend towards him, time slowing down as Jane waited for the cliché montage of his life flashing before his eyes. However, he saw nothing. He saw no clips of moments well spent or minutes regretted, he saw no insatiable meaning of life, he saw no indication that there was an afterlife awaiting him where he could be forever at peace with his lost family. He saw nothing, but he did hear something that changed the game considerably.

Gunshots.

Five of them.

The strength in his arm vanished, and instead his entire body began falling onto Jane. Pain seared at the right side of his torso, causing him to instinctively cry out as Red John's body collapsed against him, sliding to the floor. The blade, now bloody, he noticed with confusion, fell to the ground along side him with a loud clatter. Jane looked up in the direction that Red John had been standing, seeing a new person standing in the kitchen doorway, somebody that neither of them had anticipated.

"Cho?"

The agent rushed over, kicking the knife away from the fallen body. Then, he crouched below it, putting his fingers to his neck before uttering words that made Jane choke on whatever emotion was clouding his throat. "He's gone."

"He's gone?" Jane repeated, bewildered.

Cho nodded, releasing a deep breath. "He's dead."

Jane's breathing increased, his heart suddenly pounding in a way that it hadn't done when he was convinced. It was over. "Red John's dead..."

"Yeah, it's all over," Cho confirmed.

He felt dizzy as the words washed over him. Red John was dead. Thirty seconds before now, Jane had been prepared to die – for his wife, for his daughter, and yes, for Lisbon too. But now...he was gone. He tilted his head to the side, to see it again for himself. Sure enough, Jane could see blood leaking onto his kitchen floor, blood that was leaking from Red John's torso. He was face down on the ground, so he couldn't see his face, just his lifeless body, his unmoving limbs, and that back of that evil, twisted head.

"You're an idiot, you know that?" Cho told him, bringing his eyes away from the body.

"Yeah..." he acknowledged weakly. He tried to move, then remembered his hands were bound. "Can you...can you get me out of here?" he asked, suddenly feeling incredibly tired.

Cho moved to his side, untying the knot that bound his hands together. Jane bought his arms back round, wincing audibly at the movement. "You got sliced," Cho noticed, inspecting his side briefly. The fabric of his shirt moved easily to show the cut skin beneath it. "You need to go to the emergency room, hold this on it," he said, reaching for Jane's nearby jacket and pressing it against his side.

Jane pressed it there, then looked at the blood that was dripping from his shirt onto the floor by his foot, not that far away from Red John's steadily growing pool of blood. "Wow, that's a lot of blood," he observed, his voice higher than usual. Apparently blood loss was the cause of his lethargy. That made perfect sense.

"He must have got you when he fell," Cho noticed. "Go get in the car, I need to call Lisbon."

Cho reached for his phone, but Jane shook his head, taking it from him. "Uh...I don't think that's a good idea," he told him.

Cho just stared at him. "Jane, Red John is dead," he pointed out.

"Yeah, but...she'll get mad," he pointed out. "Call a back-up team, get this cleaned up. Then I'll tell Lisbon."

Cho shook his head, rolling his eyes. "Just get in the car," he said. "Wait for me there."

"Unicorn, please," he said, reaching out his hand to the kitchen table. Cho looked at him as if he were insane. "C'mon," he whined. "I'll go sit in the car like a good boy if you give me my daughter's unicorn."

Cho took hold of the unicorn and passed it to Jane, who took it from him with the hand that wasn't pressing his jacket into his side. Then, as he requested, Jane went to sit in the car, limping slightly with the pain, but feeling marginally better for the pink plush toy tucked under his good arm. When he turned to see Cho making a phone call, he realised that he wasn't calling Lisbon, and something he hadn't been expecting to do – he smiled.

The murderer who had killed his wife and daughter was dead.

He could take steps to building a new life, knowing that his love and his little girl were finally at real peace.

He could leave that house behind, never look upon that daunting smiley face again.

He'd kept his promises to Lisbon, too – he'd promised that Red John wouldn't hurt her, and that Red John would not die by his hand.

And he had his daughter's pink unicorn tucked under his arm.

So, Patrick Jane smiled.


	8. Chapter Eight

Jane's smile remained with him up until they entered the elevator of the CBI building. Then he began feeling nervous. He always got a tingling, something of a spidey-sense, when Lisbon was about to tell him off. He'd grown accustomed to it, and sometimes used it to evade the scolding, but tonight it was different – there was no getting out of it, because if he tried to avoid it the telling off would only grow in magnitude until she found him.

"You're telling Lisbon," Cho told him, as if he were the one with such strong powers of observation. It wasn't a request, it was an order.

Jane frowned, clutching his daughter's pink unicorn closer to him. "I don't want to tell her," he argued weakly.

"She'll know just by looking at you that you've done something wrong," Cho pointed out.

"I haven't done anything wrong," Jane defended, even though the blood on his shirt and the sudden presence of a plush toy instantly made him suspicious. "In fact, I did the good thing today," he boasted.

"Red John might be dead, but Lisbon doesn't know that," he pointed out. "She just knows that you left the building during a Red John case, which usually means you've done something wrong."

He scoffed as the elevator doors opened and they stepped out into the hall. "Well if she's so suspicious of me doing something wrong, perhaps she'll figure it out for herself."

"You've got blood on your shirt," Cho indicated.

Jane looked down at himself. "Ah, that's helpful," he noticed, "now I definitely won't have to tell her."

"Tell me what?"

Jane's eyes widened a little as Cho approached his desk quickly, escaping before Lisbon could bring him into the equation. Jane, on the other hand, couldn't run away. He just turned on the spot to see her standing in the entrance to the kitchen area. He looked around for a distraction, found none, and then approached her, covering the blood with his jacket and the unicorn. "Lisbon. Hi," he smiled.

"Where the hell have you been?" she asked angrily. "We're in the middle of a case."

Oh, she was mad. Incredibly mad. He doubted if he'd ever seen her this angry before, actually. This was a special level of Lisbon Rage that was usually locked away. But now it was being unleashed – on him. "Yes, about that..."

"You're not on it anymore," she snapped.

"That won't be necessary-"

"I've had enough, Jane."

He frowned. "Do you even want to know what I've done with my evening?" he asked her.

"No," she shook her head. "If you tell me what it is, then I'll have to report it."

He held back the comment about her assuming such bad things about him, and gave her a tempting smile. "Are you sure you don't want to know?" he asked again. "It's really good."

She just stared him down. "You were supposed to be here two hours ago to meet with Hightower about the Red John press conference."

"I know," he acknowledged.

"You promised me you would be in that meeting, and you're late. Two hours late. Hightower went home an hour ago! Forgive me if that doesn't make me pleased to see you."

He held up a finger. "I can explain that."

"I can't wait to hear it," she said, leaning back against one of the break room tables and folding her arms across her stomach.

He frowned at her. "But a minute ago you didn't want to know what I did."

"I just want to know why you're late," she told him. "And at some point you're going to have to explain the unicorn, but right now the lateness."

"Oh, ok," he nodded, and then lowered the arm that was holding jacket as a cover. He threw the jacket onto the table nearby the one she was leaning against, setting the unicorn more carefully on one of the chairs. When he straightened up again, she had a full view of the bloodstain covering his side.

She stiffened. "What is that?" she asked, jumping up from the table and closing the gap between them, the mothering instinct in her instantly reaching her hands towards it.

"No, don't touch it," he told her, moving back a little, but she still attempted to see it. "I said, don't touch it, woman!" he scolded her lightly, batting her hand away.

"Why are you covered in blood?" she asked him. "What did you do?"

"I'm not covered in blood," he dismissed. "There's just a bit on my shirt where I didn't clean it off properly."

Her eyes widened, and despite her anger he could see a concern sneaking into her eyes. "A bit?" she repeated. "So there was more?"

"Oh, yes," he confirmed.

"Tell me you went to the emergency room," she groaned.

"Yes, I did." Even though it had been the answer she wanted to hear, it hadn't been the one she expected, so she stared blankly at him. "Oh come on," he whined. "Would you like to see the very professionally done stitches in my side, if you don't believe me?" he asked her. "Or perhaps you'd like to see my discharge paperwork-"

"Fine, I believe you," she waved off impatiently. "Now, what happened?"

He looked away from her awkwardly. "I did promise that I'd be here for the Red John meeting, so I really think that we should have that meeting now."

"You promised you'd be here on time," she added. "Besides, we can't have that meeting without Hightower."

"If you don't mind, I'd like to have a meeting without Hightower present," he explained.

"Why?" she asked, looking at him suspiciously. Jane shifted awkwardly, wincing from the movement at his side but the wince was mainly a 'I'm about to get in trouble' expression. Lisbon recognised this look, and she widened her eyes in disbelief. "Jane, what did you do?" she asked him. "You...you went after him, didn't you?"

"What?" he asked innocently.

"You went after Red John," she repeated, the statement no longer a question.

"No!" he defended. "How do you know that I didn't run into a table or something?" he asked.

She untucked his shirt with a strangely practiced ease, and inspected the stitches that he'd already torn the uncomfortable gauze away from. "Because you have an incision that looks exactly like a knife wound with five stitches in it. No one gets that from running into a table," she shook her head in disbelief. "I can't believe you. You lied to me. Again!"

He shrugged. "I went to the emergency room, no harm done-"

"No harm done?" she repeated incredulously.

"Ok, it was a stupid idea," he agreed. "I can admit that in hindsight."

"That's an understatement. You're an idiot, Jane."

"As I've been told by Cho, the emergency room nurse, my discharge nurse, and then Cho once again," he confirmed, carefully observing her blazing eyes. "You're mad at me."

"Yes."

"I was just trying to help," he explained.

"It could have cost you your life!" she argued.

"Ah," he realised. "You were worried."

She indicated to the blood on his shirt. "You disappeared and came back hours later covered in your own blood."

He held up a finger. "Technically, not for the first time-"

"You need to stop being careless," she told him.

"Teresa, if I were being careless, I'd be dead now," he told her solemnly.

At that, there was a definite silence, one that hung in the air for quite some time. Without asking, she'd assumed that there was an encounter with Red John, and somehow, for reasons she wasn't entirely sure of, Jane has escaped with his life and five stitches to hold him together. She'd considered this another warning, of Jane crossing the boundary between being as close as Red John wanted him to be, and closer to him that he would allow him to be. But now, she knew that something deeper had happened.

"Tell me what happened," she ordered.

He averted his eyes, darting them around the room. "You didn't want to know," he reminded her.

"That was before you told me you could be dead," she told him. "Now, I want to know, and you're going to tell me everything or I swear to God I'm going to put you back in the hospital before he puts you in the morgue."

The threat was clear, but unnecessary. "That won't be happening," he assured her with a confident smile.

"Not this time!" she argued unknowingly. "You said it yourself, he's out to get you!"

"And I'm alive," he pointed out."Can't you be glad of that?"

She resisted the temptation to punch him. "You have to understand that you have limitations. You aren't immortal, Jane."

"This?" he asked, indicating to his injured side. "This isn't a limitation, this is a scratch."

"It's a stab wound!" she corrected him. "And if it were half an inch deeper and an inch further round your back, it would have damaged your kidneys and the bleeding would have been fatal."

He nodded slowly. "I see we're having a glass-half-empty day today," he noticed.

Her eyes bore holes into the back of his skull. "This is not funny," she told him sharply.

"Do you know what isn't funny?" he challenged her. "The way you're so mad at me and you keep calling me 'Jane', when a few days ago you were calling me by my first name and telling me that you had intimate feelings about me."

"We are not going into that right now," she told him.

"Did you mean that?" he asked her, ignoring her input.

"Jane-"

"Did you mean what you said, Teresa?"

"Yes," she groaned. "Yes, I meant it. Happy now?"

The grin on his features was testament to the fact that he was. "Ecstatic."

"That doesn't mean that this isn't still complicated," she added. "I meant that part as well."

"It doesn't have to be," he shrugged.

"The job comes first, Jane," she reminded him.

"The job on the whole," he asked her, "or just this case?"

"The job," she confirmed. "The job that consumes most of the waking hours of our lives."

"At least we're together when we have work," he smiled gently. "Most couples can't say that."

Her brow furrowed. "We are not a couple. We're-"

"What are we?" he asked her.

"I don't know," she rushed, trying to get back to the matter at hand. "Jane, this isn't as simple as you want it to be-"

"Yes, it is," he smiled.

"No, it's not," she shook her head. "Especially not when you're constantly going to be pushing me away every time that Red John's name comes up in a case."

"That won't be happening anymore," he assured her.

"And why is that suddenly going to change?" she asked him, not believing him for a second.

"Because Red John's dead," he told her simply.

And the news that was supposed to make her happy, to have her throwing herself into his arms, instead made her angrier than she'd ever been during this conversation. "Excuse me?" she asked, her voice dangerously low. Perhaps he'd been reaching for the stars when he thought that this might be good news for them..."

"He's dead," he repeated. "His body's on my kitchen floor...but Cho's dealing with that," he assured her, before she rushed to start focusing on the case.

She seemed to become angrier with every word he spoke. "You promised me," she seethed.

"I did," he acknowledged. "I didn't kill him," he defended quickly. "I didn't, I swear, I know I promised you, so I didn't. Cho did it."

"Cho," she repeated.

"Yes."

"Cho killed Red John."

"Well, I certainly couldn't have done it," he pointed out. "I had my arms tied behind me and a knife to my throat. Cho arrived at my house and found it in the kindness of his heart to come to my rescue and shoot the bastard before he could put that knife across my jugular like he was planning to, and then when the body fell he was still holding the knife and it caught me in my side, as you can see. So, Red John is dead," he explained. "Things are simple."

"Cho killed Red john," she repeated again.

"Yes, he did," he confirmed. "And I'm glad for it."

She frowned, clearly more confused than ever. "You are?"

He nodded. "Cho killed him because it was his job. I wouldn't have killed him for the job. For what it's worth...you were right," he said. "The vengeance wouldn't have changed anything. I can see that now."

And now, she gave him a small smile. After the secret she had shared with him, it meant a lot to her to hear him say that. "I'm glad," she said softly.

Now that she was simmering down from her anger, he took a breath. "Cho's calling Hightower," he explained. "I expect she'll be here soon, so we don't have much time."

She frowned a little. "Time for what?"

He pulled her in for a deep kiss, surprising her with the speed and urgency in which he coaxed her towards him. "Time to be honest with each other," he told her, the words whispered against her lips in a way that made her shudder.

"Patrick," she sighed.

"That's better," he smiled against her. "First names again. I much prefer it that way."

"What do you want, Patrick?" she asked him directly.

"Do you want to the long answer or the short answer?" he asked her.

"I want the truth," she told him.

He put one hand on her cheek, keeping her close to him just in case she felt the need to pull away. "The truth is, I want to spend every day with you," he told her honestly. "I want to wake up beside you every morning and go to sleep with you in my arms. I want to fight over whose turn it is to wash the dishes and insult each other over our choice of movies and books. I want to be the one who gets to kiss you after they've pissed you off. I want you to make fun of me for burning dinner, the one who yells at me for not putting my socks in the laundry hamper, and the one who forces me to get out of bed. I want to watch you fall asleep when you're so desperate to stay awake, I want to take my time getting to know every little habit I haven't figured out yet. I want us. I want you and me."

She was silent again, and then startled herself out of whatever fantasy land she'd visited while he was speaking. Her first reply was a breathy whisper against his lips. "You...you seem to have thought about this a lot."

"I haven't been able to stop thinking about this," he told her. "Not since that night..."

"Patrick," she murmured, somewhat hesitantly.

"You asked for the truth," he reminded her. "And the truth is that I'm in love with you, Teresa," she gasped at this. "And if you can look me in the eye and say that you don't feel the same, I'll drop this and never mention it again, but I have to take the chance that you do because it's killing me being so close to you all the time and knowing that I can't..." he was wordless at this, and finished his sentence again by kissing her. When he pulled away, he shook his head. "If you can do that, I'll leave, but just...say something."

She responded by kissing him fiercely, forgetting that they were still in the break room where anyone could walk in and see them. It wasn't long before tongues were clashing furiously, mouths melding together so intricately as they had done a few nights previously. The kiss moved them, both emotionally and physically, so that when they parted Lisbon found herself pressed against the counter beside the fridge, with Jane holding her fast against him, stirring feelings that had lead them to falling into bed together the other day, feelings that she never thought that she would have for Patrick Jane of all people. Yet, there he was, whispering committed words that would usually have her running a mile away from the man, but instead it bought her closer to him.

"So, does this mean..." he whispered, breathing heavily against her when they parted.

"You know what this means," she said simply.

"Wow," he breathed.

She sighed. "I'm just not sure how this is going to work."

"That, too, is simple," he assured her. "You're going to give into my charms after all these years and we'll be deliriously happy together."

She smiled, but shook her head. "I'm serious, Patrick."

"Do you think I would have risked everything if I weren't serious?" he asked her. "It's going to be hard and we're going to have to stand up for what we want and prove to everyone that it isn't a mistake, but I can do that. I can defend our relationship, fighting for us rather than against. I will fight for us, if you're in this with me."

"You love me," she whispered.

"Yeah, I do," he nodded. "I love you." She was silent..."but you don't love me?"

"No, I do," she insisted quickly. "It's..it's a hard word for me to say."

He laughed gently. "You think it was easy for me?"

She smiled sadly, ducking her eyes away for a moment. "The only man I ever said 'I love you' to stole my two-year-old, did unspeakable things to him and left his body in a ditch. I told Mark that I loved him and he responded by taking my Ben from me and shaking the life out of him." She put her hand on his cheek. "I know that you're not the monster that he is and you could never hurt anybody in that way, but I haven't been able to say those words since. You know the way I feel about you, but I need you to give me time to be able to say it."

He nodded. "As long as you do feel that way."

"You know I do," she assured him, pressing her lips to his once again.

When they parted, she sighed heavily, leaning her head against his shoulder. "The unicorn?" she asked him.

"Oh," he remembered, looking over his shoulder. "It was my daughter's," he told her.

"Why did you bring it here?"

He shrugged. "I wanted to."

"Ok," she accepted.

"You ok?" he asked her.

"This is really over, isn't it?" she realised. "He's really gone."

"Yeah, he is," he murmured.

He felt her smile against him. "It's quite nice to know that I'm not going to be murdered."

"Yeah," he nodded, wrapping his arms around her. "That's quite a relief for me as well."


	9. Epilogue

The Red John murders were part of the media for months. The first headline detailing that he had been killed, and that the reign of terror was over, was the first indication that things were over. It was when the news had started to sink in for each of them that they had done their jobs well, that they had not only caught the serial killer and prevented him from hurting anybody else, but they'd also prevented their friend and colleague from being the one to kill him, knowing that murder in cold blood would end with Jane in prison for a very long time, and in a worst case scenario, execution may have been on the table for him. But that was not the case, all that was left for them to clean up was the paperwork and Jane's kitchen, which a local unit had cleaned up after Cho's call at the scene.

Red John's real name had been Jonathan Scarlett. Even with his name he'd attempted to give them clues about his identity, Jane realised afterwards. He was forty-five years old on the day that Cho had killed him, and there was nobody that would miss him. Grace had tracked down his parents, Matilda and Andrew Scarlett, and they had the grisly task of informing the aging couple that their son had been the infamous serial killer, and that he was now dead. It had been a harrowing experience, to break the news, but it was better that they hear it from the agents than to hear it on the news. The media attacked the breakthrough quickly, and by the time they left the Scarlett house they heard about the news on the radio.

Jonathan Scarlett had been married once, his wife and eight-year-old daughter had been in a car accident, a drunk driver who had taken their lives without even realising that they had a home to go to. His first victim had been his wife's best friend, who criticised the state he was allowing himself to live in after their deaths. It had also been why Jane's family had been killed. He had seen Jane publicly slander him and he knew that the ultimate pain was to lose ones family, so he killed them. After that, after killing a child, he had lost his soul, and killing became his passion. It could have been argued, that if he had gone to court for the offences, that some lawyer with no morals would have represented him and tried to convince the jury that Jonathan Scarlett suffered from a severe mental illness, and wasn't aware of the implications of his actions, and there was a chance that he may have escaped jail and the death sentence.

There was an explanation for how he had gained the knowledge to spy on them in the way that he did – he had worked full-time as a private investigator. They had considered a history with law enforcement or a similar occupation, and meeting with his parents had confirmed that. He was a white middle class male, as the cliché went, but he wasn't a dysfunctional loner, despite his inability to cope with the death of his family. He'd been an active member of his community, and had contributed greatly to his church after he'd lost his family.

It had all been a chilling reminder of what the outcome could have been for Jane, after he lost his family.

Hightower gave them all time off when the case was over, a fortnight of paid leave in return for their services to the Red John case. During this time, Jane turned up on Cho's doorstep, with a bottle of his favoured poison. It wasn't the best thanks in the world, but it was genuine, and it was enough for Cho, who had required no thanks anyway. He did it not because it was his duty as an officer to protect a life in danger, in this case Jane's, but also because Jane was his friend, and they were now bound in the proverbial "if I killed someone, would you help me hide the body" way.

Every member of the CBI Serious Crimes team, including Jane, received a medal in commemoration of what they had done for the civilians by ridding the world of Red John. Wayne Rigsby, Grave Van Pelt, Teresa Lisbon and Patrick Jane all received the Police Star, awarded for performance with exceptional judgement and utilising skilful tactics in order to diffuse dangerous and stressful situations. Kimball Cho, the one who had pulled the trigger on Red John, received the Police Medal for Heroism, awarded for bravery and individual acts of heroism in the line of duty. Virgil Minnelli had been there alongside Madeleine Hightower to watch the agents receive their thanks.

Each of them, afterwards, had the chance to show off their medals to their families. Jane watched as they all moved around, not caring about the cameras and reporters that watched how the newly-claimed heroes reacted with their families. He was pleased to see that he'd been right about how Grace had come from a very close, loving family. Her father was embracing her proudly, her mother putting her arms around the both of them. Grace was the smaller image of her mother, but the determination in her eyes had come, as he always suspected, from her ex-football coach father. There was an elder man and woman standing to the side of them, and the matching rings on their fingers signalled that they were her brother and his wife. The brother was definitely elder than her, because of the way he ruffled her hair with blatant disregard for the formality of the service when he hugged her.

Wayne stood off to a far side with his mother, his sister, and his two nephews. Wayne's father was not there, but Jane knew there was a reason for this, a reason that he suspected lead to the small disappointment in his eyes. Deep down, Wayne was still a little boy begging for his father's approval, much like Jane had been up until a point. Still, his mother cried as she hugged him, his sister put her hand on his arm, and they both embraced him as if they were proud enough for his father not to matter. Jane, however, knew otherwise, but he still managed a smile when he noticed the way that Grace watched him across the room when he allowed both his young nephews to climb over him.

Cho was a smaller gathering, with just his mother and his girlfriend, but the recognition in their eyes at how honoured he was today was almost mind-blowing. He understood that Cho had a close relationship with his mother, but you could see from across the room that this was not just an honouring for his service on the Red John case, but also that this was a symbol of him making up for his past, for his gang trouble. This was the end chapter of the book he had spent turning pages on his behaviour. A civilly honoured officer of the law, yet he still hugged his mother like a good boy, and she still smiled with a reassurance that she had raised a fine man. And she had. Jane even had the temptation to go over and tell her that, and in any other situation he might have, but today was Cho's main day and he would let him spend it with his family.

So he turned away from the other agents and he watched the one family gathering that almost bought tears to his eyes to watch. Teresa Lisbon had descended the stage with her medal pinned to her chest and clapped eyes upon three tall men, wearing identical suits, shifting around as if just wearing them was painful for them. Her eyes had misted over, her beaming smile covering her face, and Jane had seen that it had taken all of her composure not to run to them. He knew that she'd invited her younger brothers to the ceremony, but they hadn't confirmed whether or not they were going – he could see why they hadn't told her they were though, as the surprise on her face was beautiful. He watched from a small distance away, close enough to hear her admired voice commenting on how smart they all looked, and that she couldn't believe that they came, and how it was so nice to see them all standing civilly together – he was also close enough to see the lone tear that did escape when they announced that before the ceremony they had gotten together for a talk and put their differences behind them – because if she could stop a serial killer, they could at least do that. So Jack, who had helped Teresa when her son had been taken from her, and Danny and Tommy, who had spend three harrowing days of their teenage years searching their surroundings for their lost nephew, all embraced her together, and when they pulled away she wasn't ashamed to have happy tears on her face. She had raised these boys in their parents absence, and she was proud to have them all with her today, as if that were greater recognition for her life's work rather than the medal she'd been awarded.

Then, from around the corner, more people had joined them – three woman, two a similar age to Teresa, the third younger and pregnant, and five small children. It was then, when the family appeared, that she had caught his eye and dragged him over. Jane had been shocked, but surprised as he was formally introduced to Jack, his wife Sinead and their daughters, eight-year-old Ruby and three-year-old Summer; Danny, his girlfriend Michelle and their three sons, six-year-old Charlie, four-year-old James, and one-year-old Michael, who was currently in Lisbon's arms; and Tommy and his pregnant girlfriend Hannah, their baby expected only a month from now. Of course, they were generally positive towards him, and he felt a warm feeling coming from them that he now felt from Teresa herself. But what touched him the most was how Lisbon had introduced him to her brothers.

"This is Patrick Jane," she'd said, as Jack, the eldest brother, leaned out and shook his hand.

"You torturing this guy?" he asked his sister with a laugh.

"No, actually," she corrected. "I love him."

And by the time they reached the after party that Minelli was throwing for the team and their families at his home, Jane had astounded little Ruby, Charlie, James and Summer with his tricks, while Lisbon was happy to spend some time with baby Michael, who she'd only met the once. The loss of their child, something each of them had suffered in their lives, wasn't forgotten, but it was set aside for the afternoon so that they could revel in a new sense of family, a greater sense of belonging. Before long, Cho's mother was scolding the youngest Lisbon, Tommy, for taking the last ham sandwich that Marcus, Rigsby's nephew had been reaching for. Lisbon's eldest nephew, Charlie, had struck up a sudden friendship with Rigsby's other nephew, Samuel, and the two of them were running rings around all of the adults. Grace was sat in a garden chair beside Lisbon, each of them entertaining a child, with Grace meeting baby Michael while Lisbon ended up being the naptime mattress for little Summer.

And Jane watched, he watched and he wondered if this is what life would always be like now Red John was gone from their lives – he wondered if this was what every day life would bring now that he could move on from his wife and daughter's death.

Had he been able to see the future, as opposed to reading minds, he would know that this was what it would bring. He would know that a year from now, on the anniversary of Red John's cremation (requested by his parents), he would propose to Teresa Lisbon, and she would say yes. He would know that there would be twin red-headed Rigsby girls running around within three years, and he would know that the team members would be godparents to Wayne and Grace's little children. He would know that Cho and his girlfriend would get married, and that they would adopt a little boy together. He would know that fifteen years from now they would all be gathered as a team in Minelli's garden, paying their respects in the aftermath of their retired boss's death. He would know that as Teresa stood mourning the loss of another mentor, that she would be comforted by the twelve-year-old daughter, a spitting image of herself, that clung to her side, crying for the man who had been the closest thing to a grandparent she would ever have. He would know that the best thing he could do to make this easier for all of them was to allow their daughter, and their nine-year old son, and their three-year-old daughter to sleep in the bed with them that night, so that they could cry and share memories together. He would know that despite their future losses, that they would be okay.

But he didn't know this yet, he wouldn't know until it happened.

So for now, he was happy to wonder.


End file.
